Achieve Your Goals BEFORE 2025 [Bullet Journal Planning]

Let's plan the week together. The way that I think about this is I want to very intentionally think about and plan for what the most important things are for me to do, because with any kind of job that you have or a business that you run, it's easy to get into the mindset from, you know, whatever time you start on Monday morning of solving other people's problems. Your business solves a problem that other people have. However, you have to be able to pull yourself out of the reactive, this person asked for this like specific thing and think about how am I planning big goals and projects and moving the business forward to solve that bigger picture problem that people have. It's really hard to do that if you're just reacting to little problems all the time. You have to be able to think about how am I planning and preparing for the bigger vision instead of like getting stuck in the weeds. As we look at the rest of this year, We only have 8 full weeks left in the year. But as we all know, it's holiday season, 6 weeks. And honestly, I think 6 weeks is being generous because that includes a full working week after Thanksgiving and a full working week before Christmas week. So at most, we're talking about 6 solid working weeks, not 2 months. However you want to manage the last 8 weeks, maybe 6 weeks, maybe less weeks of the year is obviously 100% up to you. What you should focus your energy on for the first week of November and going through the end of the year is clearly answering the question, what can I do in the next 6 working weeks that will provide like a launchpad for the business that I want to build, for the habits that I want to develop, for the routines that I want to establish is going to make 2025 a great year for me? And I think the best way to answer that question is by deciding what is the number one goal that will make the most impact for 2025 that I can focus on for 6 weeks. If you do that, then you will be off to a great start.

In the new year.

I gotta admit to y'all, I haven't been a great bullet journalist over the past, uh, month or so. And if you look at— this is what I have for the week ahead right now. I already have my, my GAP written out, so that's Goal, Action, Protection. I have other videos about that you can watch. Did start sketching a little bit more, and that's fun. But I got to admit, like, let's look at this. Not great. Not great, Bob, on the one line a day. And let's even go back to September. Again, not great. Not great, Bob. That's okay. And I will wholeheartedly, like, tell myself, look, man, when you do this, you feel better. Life is clearer. And that's why I say, like, getting in here and doing this on a Sunday before things get crazy is something that, yes, I need to better balance the craziness and not let myself be so reactive. But this is a way to do it. And I want you to keep that in mind that the more that you can keep yourself intentionally on task for the thing that you have defined right in here on the page pen and paper style, the clearer life is going to be, and you're going to know when you're off track. What you do about that is another video. That's another conversation. But for me, this is, this is where it starts. I've started writing down my main goal on a sticky note, one of these big 3x3s, and that way I can move it across the pages. So making it a little bit more portable than, you know, writing it every single week, which I've done that and that works just fine also. But the big goal— so let's write this nice and bold. This is a Blackwing color. I haven't sharpened it, so it's nice and bold. But these are not just my favorite colored pencils, they're the best. So my big goal 2024 final push. I have one big goal and one smaller goal, and I think I can do both in 6 weeks because I've built enough momentum and content expertise as the foundation of these goals that I think they're both reasonable. But it's still good to identify which is the most important. For me, it is Number 1, group coaching. Okay, so if you're watching this and you're thinking, what does that mean? Well, sign up to my email list and I'm going to let you know. But if you want to work with me to build a YouTube channel based on your expertise and also earn $1,000 a month just by sharing your workflows, like your screen shares, the way that you work, if you want to do a version of what I do, then sign up to my email list. Those are the people that are going to hear about it first. Going to be sending an email out about it once I have a little bit more to share. But that's— if you want to raise your hand, email list. The other place that I really like putting my weekly goal is into the calendar. And the calendar app that I've been using over the past few weeks is called Akiflow.

And I love this because it asks me like, what's your goal for the day?

What's my goal for the week? And this way I can integrate my GAP, Goal, Action, Protection method into Akiflow really well. And it helps me stay on task. It helps me stay on track. And I want to tell you a little bit more about how that works right now.

This video is sponsored by Akiflow, which is the best app for managing your tasks and meetings together. Now, this channel focuses almost entirely on analog tools like the Bullet Journal, note cards, sticky notes, etc., etc.

You get the idea.

But one tool that I just can't leave behind is the calendar. I use my calendar to stay focused and aligned with my goals. Everything gets scheduled and tracked so I can see how much time is spent on different projects and tasks. ActiveFlow is my favorite tool for this because it has so many thoughtful features. One that stood out to me right away that may not be obvious is time slots. I love it because it helps me block time slots, and you can also make those recurring as well. Day after day, week after week, you know that you're already protecting time for the things that matter the most to you. Now, every week I have an easy-to-follow system that's already embedded into my calendar for things like writing a newsletter, posting to the community, or uploading a new YouTube video. Akiflow is also using AI technology in a really useful and helpful way. A simple example is that it automagically adds tags and projects to your time slots events, and tasks. And the more that you use AkkaFlow, the more that it learns about your work trends and habits. And just a heads up, if you're worried, this information, your data, is only trained on your own AI model, so it stays very private and isn't used for a larger LLM. I also like the daily rituals feature, including daily planning and daily shutdown. I know they didn't mean to do this, but defining a goal for the day is something that syncs really nicely with my GAP planning method, so the goals, the actions, and protecting time. I can do all of that so easily inside of Akiflow. Another little thing that I like about the daily ritual and the planning feature is that it gives you a card with a link that easily allows you to share the plan of what you're working on that day with your team. It's honestly one of the best integrated calendar tools that I've ever used because not only does it have all that great, you know, task management that I've already told you about, but it also syncs incredibly well with Notion. It's honestly one of the smoothest Notion integrations that I've seen. There are thousands of apps, so you can use ClickUp, you can use Trello, you can use Asana, or hundreds, I said thousands of others to make Agiflow work well for you. Viewers of my channel get a special discount to Agiflow by using the link in the description below.

So I'm writing these two down so that I can just stick them over and over again in my Bullet Journal and have this ready to go. And that way I can move it, you know, week to week, month to month. Every time I open, I'm seeing this sticky note. I'm still setting up the one line a day grid because I think it's important as a practice, even if I don't really get into it. As I admittedly haven't the last couple of months because, you know, I do usually journal a lot more just in my normal pocket, pocket journal. This is one from 14 years ago, 2010. Just be willing to, uh, forgive yourself when you don't follow through on some of the things that you wish you would have. Not giving you an excuse for it, just a willingness to try again instead of thinking that you can't do it at all or you won't ever do it. There's always tomorrow. At some point, if you want to achieve the things that you want to achieve, if I want to do the things that I want to do, you got to do them. But beating yourself up isn't going to help you do better tomorrow. I use a weekly stacking system and I break down my big goal into 6 achievable weekly mini goals, and those become the foundation for my weekly gap planning system. Subgoals, weekly goals that I can— if I complete each of these each week, then I'll know that I've done everything that I could have done. And I know that I'll give myself a much better chance of knocking this out. Before I go any further, I want to tell you that if you're watching this, you can skip to the timestamp that's right here if you don't want to watch me explain my 6 subgoals and talk through them. If you're interested in like how I plan launches and products and offers, this is going to be helpful to you as a creator, as a business owner.. But if you just gonna be like, okay, I got it, Matt. 6 weeks, 6 sub-goals for each week to achieve the big goal that you have. If you wanna say like getting in the weeds of project planning and launch planning, this is gonna be helpful to you. I know that, uh, the last week, actually, if we were to say like week 7, that would be looking back at the calendar, that would be like the week of I would launch this. I would say like launch, December 26th, actually. Okay, so now what's happening in these 5 weeks? Outline and outreach starts this week. That's going to be— probably should have made— leave— left a little bit more space for this, but let's say this is going to be starting, uh, November— when is tomorrow? November 4th, uh, November 11th, November 18th. I'm building in a little bit of margin for this as well, which I I haven't always been very good at, because I'm skipping in a week right here on week 3 of, now this is going to be Thanksgiving. So this is December 2nd, December 9th, and December 16th. Okay, and then we launched December 26th. So if that's the goal, let's take out our, our yellow. Number 1 goal. So then the actions for that number 1 goal are create outline of program, find the promised, send hand raiser email. Just those 3 things. Now that I have my big goal planned for the last 6 weeks and I have my sticky note that's going to help me, I also have this big goal page in my bullet journal., but I want to be able to come back to it quickly. And so for that, I've been using— I'm not always a big, like, you know, little sticky tab fan. I use them a lot more in books, but for something like this, I just want to be able to come back to this really quickly. Pull this back a little. There we go. So now when I open it up, there we go. So now even as I move through the weeks now, what it should be is on the week of November 4th, Number 1 goal is this. And then when I go next week, you know, give myself a handful of pages to get to next week, then I will put week number 2. Can I start booking calls? Can I get calls and refine the offer? Great. That's going to go on the gap for that week. And then little by little, slow and steady, I just keep working through this. When I do this, I would go through the same process. And maybe it's not 6 weeks, maybe it's only 4 weeks, maybe I don't put those in. You could think of them more like milestones, and when you reach that milestone, no matter how long it takes, you just move on to the next one. But that's how I think about goals. I'll talk about my goal setting frameworks a lot more as we get closer to the new year, because New Year, New Me, New Goals is very popular. And yeah, y'all love that, and I do too, around the new year. And so be on the lookout for that video after Thanksgiving. This is how it works. This is how I stay productive. This is how I do the things that I need to do. I break things down. I time block them and a great place to do time blocking and make it consistent and efficient is in Akiflow. I just love the time slot because the time slot is what I do for the protection part of the gap. And then the ability to slot these action items into the time slot just makes everything a lot more efficient for me. And I have Flow to thank for that. So definitely check it out. Thanks to them for supporting the channel one more time. Let me know. Give me a little hand raise. Join the email list if you're interested in group coaching with me in January. And also let me know what kind of videos you might want to see as we come into the new year and into the holidays. I got a bunch of ideas, but I always get some of my best ideas based on feedback that I get from y'all. So join the newsletter, like and subscribe, and leave any feedback that you have in the comments.

Thanks for watching.