This post is all about how to plan your life like a pro.
Are you feeling like you’re stuck in your life? Does it seem like every day is the same and you have nowhere new to go? You probably didn’t set any goals for your life. Do you know how to plan your life for a future tailored to your lifestyle?
Why Do You Need To Know How To Plan Your Life?
Planning Makes Your Look Forward To The Future
Planning out your life makes you look forward to your future. You can start to envision you reaching your end goal. You can envision how happy you are.
Most of us have the fear of the unknown. We don’t know where we’ll be in 10 years or whether we will be as successful as the people around us.
The only way to almost guarantee your future success is to plan for it.
So, instead of fearing the future unknown, make a plan and make your future what you want it to be.
You may also like This Is What Happens When You Say Yes More Often
Planning Gives You A Purpose
Having a life plan gives you a purpose to live.
There are a lot of people that were taught to go to school, get a job to pay bills, and then die. Okay, well maybe they explained the dying part in a less grim way.
I know that not everyone was taught to live this way but this is the general basis.
If you set goals for yourself and start planning out your life, you’ll still follow the steps of getting to school and getting a job, but doing these life activities is your way of reaching your goals faster. Setting goals will help make your life your own so you aren’t doing what everyone else is doing.
If you want to live in a giant custom house, you’re going to need a job (like everyone else) to eventually pay for that custom-built house; however, it won’t seem like you’re doing it because you’re supposed to anymore.
Doing these life activities is something that you want to do because you know it’ll take you to where you want to be in the future.
Planning Keeps You Productive
We all know that being productive is a love-hate relationship with ourselves. Some days we just want to sit on the couch with a bag of chips. Other days, we want to check off every item on our to-do list.
So with the latter option, you need to plan if you want a to-do list to follow in the first place.
This brings my point of why you need to know how to plan your life.
Imagine how boring it would get if you were sitting on the couch every single day eating chips. Sure, eating chips is a tasty activity but after a while, your favorite activity will no longer be fun.
Next thing you know, you’re 60 years old still doing the same thing.
As humans, we like variety. We love learning. We love the challenge.
Once you’re a pro at sitting on the couch and eating chips, you won’t have anything new to add to your life, you’ll start feeling sad, useless, and lazy.
Planning your life, whether it’s planning for the next day or the next day, will keep you on your feet and prevent your life from passing by you. You’ll be able to look back and feel proud of yourself for everything that you have done.
Planning Holds You Accountable
Having a written out life plan keeps you accountable for what you want to do and need to do.
If you don’t have a plan, you won’t know where to start, when to start, or what you’re doing in general.
Having a plan reminds you every single day about why you are living.
You’ll stay focused every time you see on paper the words: “In 5 years, I want to pay off all my student loans” because every reminder means you will be actively thinking about how to spend your money now to pay off those loans faster.
Without a plan, your student loans will just sit in the back of your mind and will keep accumulating interest because you forgot all about it.
Having that life plan keeps you on track to reaching your goals and makes it a little harder for you to lose focus and push your goals aside.
You have no excuse to back out or push it aside because you know exactly what your goals are and know that the only way to reach them is to act on them.
Planning Gives You A Clear Vision Of What Needs To Be Done And When
Like I said previously, the future holds a lot of unknown events that we are afraid of getting to. We’re scared that we’ll be a failure while everyone else is flourishing.
When you create a plan, you’ll know exactly what you need to do and when you need to do them.
One of my long-term goals is to be a stay-at-home mom. Obviously, one of my plans of action is to get married to someone who is financially stable. But the main plan of action is making sure I develop healthy spending habits to save up as much money as I can.
With how young I am, I need to use time in my favor. Investing is a really good way to start saving for the future.
This is only one example of many but because I have a plan for my life, I know exactly what I need to do now to get there.
If you do exactly what I am doing with whatever goal you have, you’ll reach your goal in no time.
Side Note
It was about 7 years ago I was bummed about losing the boy I thought was going to be my world. (I was a freshman in high school. How ridiculous was that??)
It took me about a year to realize that I need to get back on my feet and realize that the only person that can make me happy is me.
Granted, I had the help of my distant relatives and a trip to Europe for me to have these realizations but if it weren’t for me realizing what my goals were, I wouldn’t be as happy as I am right now.
Everything I have done up until this point was all done because I was planning and living with the intention of getting me to where I want to be in 10 years.
I want to help you plan out your life and experience the bliss of having a life plan like I do right now. Having a plan is the best thing you can do for yourself, trust me.
This post is all about how to plan for your life like a pro.
Disclaimer
I am not a professional in any of the topics that I discuss below ESPECIALLY anything money-related. I only speak from my experiences and what I hear from the people around me. Read at your own risk and do more research on your own time outside of this post. I will not be held responsible for any of the consequences that come from the decisions you make.
This post contains examples and scenarios that may appear offensive; however, that was not the intention. My lifestyle is just different than what you see in your life or other people’s lives. My goal is to expose you to all the possibilities of how you can live your life so that you aren’t doing the same thing every single day.
–
Let’s begin.
–
How To Plan Your Life Like A Pro
1. Get Some Kind Of Planner
First things first, you need to get yourself a planner. Something that you can write down your goals on.
You can have a traditional physical planner or calendar, or you can go digital like the rest of the world and use google calendar.
You can also make your own online planner if you want.
The purpose of a planner is for you to prevent forgetting about your tasks and know exactly what you need to get done and when.
It is also helpful to be able to see all of your tasks at once so that you can brace yourself for the amount of work you’re about to do.
I see on lots of social media platforms how people are starting to use iPads to write on planner templates digitally. I find their electronic templates to be really cool because of how you can literally have everything you need on one device.
Unfortunately, I do not have an iPad so I have resorted to a traditional physical planner. You choose what works for your interests and lifestyle. Just make sure you have some kind of planner in general.
2. Write Down Your Goals
With the previously said planner, you need to write down your goals. You need to write down both your long-term and short-term goals.
For long-term goals, these may be paying off your loans, owning a house by the time you turn 30, or something along those lines. Having these long-term goals keeps you in check of how you should spend your time and efforts now to get to your long-term goal.
For short-term goals, you could have to do laundry or clean the kitchen tomorrow or something of the likes. Short-term is more for something that is going to happen very soon.
For me, my short-term goals mainly revolve around school and getting projects done.
Writing down these goals forces you to remember them and makes you more likely to achieve them.
I believe in the saying “out of sight, out of mind”. So, the only way you can truly obtain your goals is to have them written down somewhere so that you are constantly reminded about them.
If you have a really good memory and don’t need to write it down, then good for you (but there had to be that one time you really needed to remember something and didn’t).
If you have the time, just write it down really quickly. In the long run, it’ll benefit you.
3. Identify Why You Want To Reach These Goals
After you have identified your goals and written them down, you need to understand why these are your goals.
Does thinking about getting there make you happy? Are you trying to be better than everyone else? How important are these goals to you?
Identifying why you want to reach these goals helps you know which goals are priorities.
I have the goal of being a stay-at-home mom and having a custom-built house.
Why do I want to be a stay-at-home mom? I want to raise my children myself and not miss any of their milestones.
Why do I want to have a custom-built house? I’m tired of living in a house and wishing it was structured differently.
Now that I have written both of these goals out, I realize that becoming a stay-at-home mom is more important to me because my children will only grow up once.
I will still have opportunities to have a custom-built house after my children don’t need me anymore.
Knowing why you want to reach these goals will make it easier for you to get excited about them and work towards them in the order that you see fit.
4. Create Dealines For Your Goals
Now that your goals and your whys are written out, you need to set deadlines for yourself.
I mentioned it briefly earlier about how maybe you want to own a house by the time you’re 30.
Saying that you want a house by the time you’re 30 is setting a deadline.
Once you have a deadline, you’ll have a better idea of how much time you have to work with.
Since you know how much time you have to reach your goal, you can start evaluating what you need to do every day to reach that goal.
Setting deadlines takes us to my next point.
You may also like What Happens When You Procrastinate?
5. Create Your Plan Of Action
After setting these deadlines, you need to create your plan of action.
How do you intend to reach this goal? What do you have to do now to make it easier for you in the future?
If you want to own a house by the time you’re 30, you need to make sure you have a steady job and are setting aside money every month that will go towards this new house of yours.
So the order goes, get a good-paying job, make sure it’s a steady job, develop good spending habits, set money aside every month.
What I listed is a brief plan of action but it is still a plan of action.
Having a plan of action will make your goal seem more attainable. Any goal that you set requires a set of actions before you can get there. You have to work for what you want.
Now that you know exactly what you need to do to reach your goal, you can start working towards your goal every single day until you get there.
You Know How to Plan Your Life. What Now?
Now that you know how to plan your life like a pro, you need to start acting towards your goals.
You want to be careful when it comes to planning though because planning can be very addicting. (I know from experience.)
Try to avoid being that person that does all planning and no doing. I can’t tell you how many people I have met who have these big goals and dreams but never do anything about it.
They follow the thought that “one day” they will get there. “One day” can be now if you start doing the steps to reach your goals right now.
The sooner you start, the sooner you will be successful.
Ending Note
This is the end of this brilliant post (lol, I am definitely biased) and I just wanted to remind you that focusing on the end goal is important; however, you also need to appreciate the journey that got you there.
Going back to that custom-built house we all know you might want one day, you should appreciate the journey of saving up all that money and creating that blueprint of what you want your new house to be.
Your end goal will only be more satisfying if you are aware of how much effort you put into it.
After you’ve reached your goal, start all over and make new goals!
Life is a never-ending cycle of making goals and reaching them.
I hope you liked this post. Let me know in the comments what you think of my tips and tell me what your life goals are. How are you going to plan for them? Have a good day!
This post was all about how to plan your life like a pro.
Leave a Reply