Family Annual Planner and Goal Setting

I’m not one for New Year resolutions as I find them to be too negative and restrictive, but I do love planning. I always have life plans and goals on the go, but this last year has felt a little flat so I decided to boost things up a little and go all out on my yearly planning and goal setting.

Now, I usually do my life planning around August/September time as I tend to find that December and January get so busy that we’re half way through the first month before I really get a chance to catch my breath again, which means plans go off the rails before they’ve even begun. That being said, this year I am planning my next year in December, ready to hit the ground running come the 1st Jan – well the 4th actually as my plans start on a Saturday.

2019 has been a decent year for us, I’ve had lots of time with my kids, they’re happy and healthy, and we’ve been on a lovely holiday. But my own health has been really bad which has a knock-on effect on the state of my house, my relationships with others, and I just don’t feel like I’ve grown or progressed this past year, and I really love continuously learning and developing myself and being busy busy busy. And so, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks really focusing my time on developing our family annual planner, my goal setting for next year, and detailing out how I’m going to achieve those goals.

Where did I start…

The family annual planner was my first port of call. Don’t judge me but I’m a big lover of spreadsheets and almost everything digital I create is in Excel. This does mean however that I will create multiple versions – the excel digital file, wall hanging calendar, paper diary, and any printables I need. but you can use whatever format is most familiar and comfortable to you – in fact that’s a tip for life – do what’s good for you and what works for you, don’t follow instructions blindly if it doesn’t work for you, most things can be tweaked and tailored.

The Family Annual Planner
The structure for my planner is a long list with the date and day on the left and then space to the middle and right to add in activities and events for the year.

The first thing I added was birthdays and anniversaries, followed by school term dates and bank holidays so I know when we can take time away as a family. The next thing is my personal passion and that’s Formula 1, I added the dates of all the F1 races for next year. I then added the clubs that my children go to. This is what I call the bones of our annual plan, now it’s time to flesh it out…

But before getting to the really fun part, I decided to move over to planning our goals for next year, as there’s plenty of more things I could add in but I wanted to ensure I stayed focused on the areas for growth and improvement that I’d identified.

Goal Setting
I should probably pre warn you that I have a lot of goals for my family and myself – 39 at last count. They are all separated into different sections, and some of them are very simple and can be completed in a few minutes (opening a bank account for specific savings) or are just a matter of developing a new habit (going to bed by 11 pm). The reason I’ve included all of these is because I find the easy, simple things can often become the most overlooked – I can do that later because it only takes 5 mins – sound familiar? Only later never comes, now everything is listed out in my goals it is much more likely to be achieved.

The main goal categories I have are:

1. Family Goals

Example: Friday family nights (food, movie, games)

2. Personal Goals

a. Goals to nourish my mind
Example: Reading a min. of 1 book per month

b. Goals to nourish my body
Example: Follow pelvic floor protocol to repair my diastasis recti

c. Goals to nourish my soul
Example: Declutter and organise every room in my house and garden

d. Continuous self-improvement
Example: Develop a deeper connection to self and source

3. Financial Goals

Example: Set up savings fund for next Christmas with auto deposits

4. Business Goals

Example: Write and publish at least one blog post per week

Once I had a rough draft of my goals, I had a good idea of what other activities I would want to include in our annual family planner to achieve those goals. For example, reading a minimum of one book per month requires me to visit the library at least once a month, so I now have this scheduled in the planner for one Saturday morning per month – we already visit the library occasionally and the school library weekly, so this one is more for me but my children love books too so it’s a great addition to the planner for all of us.

When I’m scheduling which activities for which weeks, one thing I keep in mind is if any of my goal setting activities fit well together, or should be more spread out from each other e.g. we can be more active as a family on Saturdays by either walking or cycling to the library, those two elements fit really nicely together, but a day out and about walking all day is best not combined with an evening scheduled as date night as I’m likely to want a quieter evening at home after a really busy day with the kids.

The final schedule I settled on for these activities is generally busy Saturdays and quieter Sundays, with every other Saturday being slightly lower key so I can still have date nights in there with less chance of being burned out and wanting to cancel. I have a four-week rolling schedule that I’ve put into the family planner, with a few tweaks here and there when clashes came up.

Now the planner has some flesh, it was time for my favourite part – holiday planning! I love love love travelling, and I’ve really missed not visiting new places over the last few years whilst I’ve been having the children, it was a decision I made before they were born but oh my goodness are my feet itchy or what?!

This process is so enjoyable for me that I’ve even planned all our holidays for the year after next and if they were open for bookings already, they would be booked. I currently have three holidays booked now for next year, and another one prepped and ready to book come January pay day – you know how that one goes right, but I’m very fortunate that I get paid mid-month so I don’t have to wait too long.

Our holidays this year are quite low key, mainly because I was so late in deciding where to go and I needed to make sure they easily fit within my budget and the school term times. The three booked are only 3-4 hours from home and the final one will be in France (we live in the UK), so not too far from home either, just a half days travel. Now these are final dates I added them to the family planner and included dates and reminders of when the payments need to be made, and also the check in and check out times to plan the travelling.

The majority of our family annual planner is now complete, the final steps were checking for local activities and events already arranged to see what takes our fancy and schedule them in. I found a few great activities for the February half term which was really easy to slot in as it’s a week off school with no events yet allocated, there is also a very highly rated circus coming local to us in Spring, a few theatre shows my children will love, a pirate party at the local civic centre, and some local festivals.

Some other great events I found, which I haven’t scheduled for us, are air shows, car shows, local race track events, fireworks at sea, monster trucks, Disney on ice, cheese festivals, beer and cider festivals, music festivals, and so much more. I found the majority of events on the Facebook events section, but you can also check out your local town hall or community centres, Eventbrite and even Airbnb.

I find it really useful to have completed my goal setting before looking for events, as it’s easy to go off on a tangent and try to schedule everything in, but for me personally it was important when going through this process that I kept my goals in mind at all times and scheduled the activities that help me meet those goals first, then kind of fill in any gaps.

Our family planner is as complete as it can be for now, I know more events will come up as we get closer to school half terms and I have some space over the Easter holidays and summer holidays that I would like more filled, but for now that is the annual planer done and all our goals planned and detailed out for next year.

I hope you found this useful, I’d love to hear how you plan your year and any tips you might like to share with me?

Rebecca xx