Happy New Year and welcome to 2025! I hope you’re feeling pumped for the new year and ready to start hashing those dreams.
This time of year I’m always raring to go and love the feel of a new year feeling that the start of a shiny new project. But I have learnt over the years that diving into the new year and trying to change too much all at once isn’t any good for me.
I get off to an amazing start initially and I’m crushing all my goals, but after a few weeks I run out of steam and stop making progress on anything. It stops all my momentum and then I have to dig really deep to get started on things again.
I’m going to share 3 tips on how I approach goals now instead of how I used to approach them to make more sustainable progress.
1 – The 12 Week Year
When you’re planning what you want to do in a year, it feels like a really long time. But when you’re actually living it, it goes by really quickly.
Lots of people overestimate what they can achieve in one year, but underestimate what they can achieve in 5 years.
Bill Gates
So instead of planning a whole year ahead, instead I choose what i’m going to focus on in each quarter like a business does. I first came across this idea in the aptly named The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington (Amazon link).
There are a whole bunch of reasons why it’s a great approach to goal setting but the main reason I like it is it gives me permission to focus on 2-3 goals at a time knowing that I’ll get to the others after they are done.
2 – Scheduling rest
I’m sure you’re heard the phrase “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” Which in business, just causes some people to be overworked and others to slack off!
We all know that a cram-packed calendar isn’t sustainable. And yet we still do it. We have goals we want to achieve and scheduling them in is how we make sure we do them.
I used to feel guilty for resting and watching tv for the whole night. But a lesson I learnt from my partner, is that rest is productive too.
Especially if you’ve had an intensive day like a key client meeting, a job interview or a stressful family situation. You need time to recharge so you can get back on it.
So now, I schedule in time for actions towards my goals, but also for rest. If there’s not enough time for rest, then I need to scale back my goals for the quarter or free up time elsewhere.
3 – Regularly review your goals
Last year I set a goal of releasing an EP on streaming services where I wrote the music, sang, played every instrument, did the mixing and the releasing too
At the time I set it, I hadn’t even written a song before! I thought that setting this goal would be exciting and inspiring. And it was… at first.
But when I started learning the instruments, writing songs and working with music production software I realised just how huge the goal was and soon realised it wasn’t achievable. Especially because I also started a YouTube channel sharing what I was learning about it. Which also involved learning how to script video, edit, film etc.
Looking back I realised that the goal was far too ambitious. As the year went on, I realised releasing an EP wasn’t going to happen without sacrificing progress on other things. And an EP is very unlikely to make me money so I had to be realistic and put my energy into learning video skills instead.
When I later realised my music channel wasn’t going to have the positive impact on others that I wanted, and I started this new project instead, I was happy I invested my time in video skills instead of music.
Make sure you keep reflecting on your goals throughout the year and see if they still resonate with what you want. It’s ok to abandon a goal and start a new one. I still learnt a lot of stuff about music even though I changed my focus.
Key takeaways
Keep your goals sustainable throughout 2025 by:
- Setting 2-3 quarterly goals
- Scheduling rest time in your calendar
- Regularly review whether your goals are still what you want