Five lessons learned from long-term life planning

Looking back on tax records, I’ve been working and paying taxes for over 30 years, which sounds absurd to me, but makes sense with all of the retail and grunt work I started with early in my career.

When I started taking a more active interest in my own professional And personal life, I used vision boards to help prioritize and formalize some of my ideas about what success looks like for me.

Typically these involve slides with quotes and images, and I go through them about once a month.

I’ve recently looked into planning by decade, so that in a general 10 year span, I know where I’m hoping to be headed.

From this process I’ve learned five main lessons that have helped me, and I’m sharing them here: determine intentions in great detail, find and work toward the ideal end state, calendar reminders, stretch abilities, and most importantly, keep going.

I’d like to think that I am in a good position to share my knowledge, as I have been happily married 20+ years, own my home and vehicle debt-free, work as an employee-owner at a stable company with over $10mm in annual revenue, fund my retirement every year, and have a college fund for each of my three children. Take what you will and adapt to your own needs:

Think through intentions in great detail

I’ve learned that, at least with goals, my brain doesn’t distinguish between an intent and a manifestation. My intent has to be extremely clear, and well thought-through and thoroughly-imagined, in order for the manifestation to naturally proceed.

When I say work from home, what does that mean? Does it mean an office? a standing desk in the living room? or at my kitchen table?

When I say work in tech, what does that mean? Am I coding and debugging, am I doing documentation, am I working with clients? Am I writing reports?

When I say healthy, what do I mean? Does this mean the number of hours I sleep at night, my weight, my exercise schedule, how much I can lift, how far I can run?

When I say financially comfortable, what do I mean? How much is enough? What does a typical monthly budget look like?

Determining as many of these items as you wish, and constantly fine-tuning them, has been much of the work of my intention and goal-setting. If you dream it, you believe it and achieve it. PS, these intentions are just yours, they don’t need to be shared with anyone unless you want to.

Find and work toward the ideal end state

How will you know if you’ve arrived? Your destination is fairly straightforward on a train, car, or airplane journey. But for more intangible ideals, I think it’s been good to give myself some grace and flex for what I consider to be “the end state.”

Ongoing evaluation allows us to modify or change our goals as our lives change. For example, I used to be heavily interested in diamonds. I thought having diamond this or diamond that would constitute my ideal end state. As I learned more about their extraction and marketing, some of my emphasis on using them as a marker of success faded, and I was able to evolve into other similar, but different markers.

We don’t need to be holding on to an earlier version of our goals. If you achieve something and you’re proud of it, fantastic. I’m a big believer in people setting long-term goals and reaching them. However, don’t become beholden to a less mature or more impulsive version of yourself —  your today is determined in some part by your yesterday, but your future will shift based on your choices today. Evaluate your choices frequently and adjust as needed.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. — Gustav Mahler

Calendar reminders

By far, what has made a difference for me has been Google Calendar. This tool mixed in with FutureMe for periodic messages, helps me organize and place into buckets each of the different aspects of my life that I want to work on. I calendar myself time for what I want to do, and then my life incrementally includes those ideals, like family time, relationship time, reading, exercising, and more.

This includes my own self development time- I set appointments with myself to go over my resume or finances.

Not only do I calendar rides for school and sports pickups, or doctor and vet appointments, but I also calendar for personal time, or for filling out my taxes, or checking in on insurance. Date night is an opportunity! My family also uses shared calendars in order to keep everybody informed (such as the aforementioned school and sports pickups).

I’ve even started calendaring my own time for me to participate and work on my own hobbies. Again, I’m not beholden to the calendar, but I use it as a prompt for working through everything I want to get done.

Stretch abilities

Change is the only constant, and I found it helpful to continually stretch my abilities through licenses, classes, certification, and additional ways to expand my thinking.

My company invests in continuing education and with that annual allowance I have attended and spoken at conferences, received my Certified Scrum Master certification, studied for and passed the exam for IAAP accessibility certification, attended The Grand coaching series, and read through multiple business and management books and workbooks.

At the library and Khan Academy, education is free or very low cost, so I think there’s always a place for each of us to increase our knowledge.

Similarly, in terms of skills, we can always stretch. These could be hobbies, crafts, community involvement, volunteering or board participation, and any other opportunity for growth where you learn more and rely on your own skills more, and get increasingly interconnected with the community around you.

Physically, I also think of this as stretching every day, to keep our bodies limber and fit. We can stretch like this with all aspects of our lives.

Keep going

Every day is a gift. Every time we wake up as another opportunity, and every day that we are alive, to my mind, means our life purpose is not yet fulfilled.

This is easier said than done, I know. We each struggle with anxiety, depression, mental unwellness, trauma, anger, and grief. COVID took away so much. Many of us are struggling on a day to day basis.

If you are ever feeling alone or overwhelmed, reach out to someone you love and let them know how you’re feeling. Find the people and resources you need to keep going.

“Work is the substitute for hope and the antedyne for pain” was a very valuable quote my professor Jane-Marie Law shared with me, from her own teacher.

While we sometimes don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, especially when we feel overwhelmed in the midst of the darkness, for me the idea is to keep holding on, and to keep moving forward, and to keep taking one additional step each day, and not completely giving up. This is what sustains me.

These were the five most prominent ideas that came to my mind when thinking about long-term vision boards, and long term planning in 10-year, 20-year, 50-year increments.

Keep going! You got this!

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

- St. Paul