# Planning 2024 in Obsidian ---  ---  ---  ---  ---  notes: - Hi there! In this video, I'm sharing how I'm planning my 2024 using my new life operating system I made in Obsidian. - To create this system, I've recently been consuming a LOT of life design and productivity resources. I'm talking - Ali Abdaal's recent book [[Feel Good Productivity Application]] - August Bradley's life design system Pipelines Pillars Vaults - The infamous Getting Things Done methodology - [[The 12 Week Year]] Goal setting system - Cal Newport's Deep Life philosophy - And various other annual reviews and planning workflows, just to build a system that I'm satisfied with - So, what does it look like? I'll give you a sneak peek --- # The System - Vision board - Multi-scale planning - Goals and projects - Trackers notes: - I'll be showing you the example in the USV since we'll be setting it up in this video *Vision Board* - First off, it has a vision board to see your goals from all the different time horizons to keep your daily actions aligned with your long-term aspirations - Periodic reviews to help you reflect, adjust, and prepare for the future on a yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily level - Goal and project notes to help you clarify your objectives and turn them into actionable tasks and habits - And trackers to visualize your progress on relevant habits and key metrics to stay on path towards your ideal life --- *Why am I doing this?* 🧐 *What ideas and workflows are the foundation of this system?* ⚙️ *How do I ACTUALLY use it?* 🤪 notes: - So, in this video I'll be sharing: - Why I'm doing this - What ideas and workflows are the foundation of this system - And lastly, I'll showcase me planning for 2024 in my own personal vault to literally show you how i'll be using it --- # Why? notes: So, why do I care so much about designing my life to such an extreme extent? On my deathbed, I want to have lived a fulfilling life where I worked towards my full potential and long-term goals. But as I was doing my 2023 reflection, I realized there were two obstacles preventing me from fully doing so: - I didn't always feel driven to work on my daily tasks, which impeded my progress - I had trouble sticking to and remembering long-term goals and values I realized, these two obstacles stemmed from the disconnect between my long-term goals and my short-term actions. I don't want the two to act like a divorced couple, I want a happy healthy thriving marriage between them so to solve this, I refined my multi-scale planning system. --- ###### Yearly ⬇️ ###### Quarterly ⬇️ ###### Monthly ⬇️ ###### Weekly ⬇️ ###### Daily notes: A multi-scale planning system aligns your long-term visions into smaller timeframes like quarterly, monthly, and weekly, all the way until your actionable daily life. It provides different layers of clarity as a foundation for pursuing our goals. And I believe this will solve my problems as it promotes Cal Newport's idea of [[Attention-centred productivity]]. --- ### Prioritization > Doing More notes: Instead of the traditional view on productivity where you try to do as much as you can and base your self-worth on your accomplishments, attention-centered productivity is about being intentional with where you focus your time and energy. It's not about doing more, but doing less of the things that aren't important to you, making you feel less busy and feel more personally fulfilled. %% And in an online capitalist environment where we prioritize learning how to make $10,000 a month before even thinking about what we want to use that $10,000 a month for, I think it's important to start with intention. %% Anyways, I think that's enough of me rambling, how about we dive into the system? --- # Follow along with me https://notes.johnmavrick.com notes - 📹 Planning 2024 with Obsidian - My Alignment Philosophy Vault configuration and templates: https://shop.johnmavrick.com/usv notes: You can follow the same workflow I am by checking out my published notes at notes.johnmavrick.com But that contains only the steps I take, not the vault setup and templates. Those are inside the Ultimate Starter Vault, a downloadable version of the Obsidian setup I use from my 2 years of experimentation. Links to everything will be in the description. --- # Reflection notes: - Before we plan it's important to do some reflecting on the year that just finished - Unfortunately, for other people's privacy I'm not going to go completely share my 2023 review, but will go over my workflow. - If you are interested in a video or example of this, feel free to let me know --- ### 4 quarterly ### 12 monthly ### 52 weekly notes: - In my 2023 reflection I first went through all of last year's quarterly, monthly, and weekly reviews --- notes: - *I went through 60+ prompts that I gathered in `My annual review prompts`* - Obviously overkill, I would recommend you only do what resonates - Next, I created a task for each insight i wanted to remember when planning for 2024, which I was able to see with this action items query that looks for all tasks in a specific note - *visit 2024 note* - I ended up with some recurring mindsets I want to bring into 2024 like wanting to feel like I'm in growth mode rather than survival mode, which can be faciliated by my other idea on thinking that life is a game - Also thought of some goals and habits for the new year like learning japanese and with writing more for my personal brand, which I can keep in mind when planning out my goals - However. The main thing I wanted to incorporate this year are these two tasks in bold: - read tasks - And so, this is what became my focus for 2024 and the inspiration for this planning system. - To get a higher order overview, we can visit the heart of the system, the vision board --- ## Vision Board notes: All the planning I'll be doing for the year will be easily accessible through this main vision board note that automatically shows you the related goals from different time horizons - To help me prioritize what's important, this note will act as a reminder for all the main motivations, goals, and projects that are currently active - Right now I'm rercording this video on Jan 27, so it is showing me stuff for the year 2024, 1st quarter, 1st month, and 4th week - During the start of my days, I'll review this note to remember what my priorities are and why I want to do them, energising me to stay focused by seeing how my daily actions relate to my future self's aspirations - *if we look in my own vault, it's a bit empty since we haven't planned anything yet, but we'll be seeing it grow as we continue* - Matter of fact, let's start now at the top with our yearly planning and work our way down. --- # Yearly - Yearly theme - 12-month celebrations - Yearly goals notes: *we can go back to my note for this year* Personally, I don't think trying to exactly plan how you want your next year is worth it. So, in my plan I focus on very high-order things like - My yearly theme - The wheel of life by Ali Abdaal and it's related 12-month celebrations - And any additional yearly goals I have in mind *slides* --- # Alignment Practicing [[Attention-centred productivity]] by making sure your daily actions are in accordance with your higher order goals, visions, and values. notes: Like mentioned earlier, my yearly theme is alignment, which I define as practicing [[Attention-centred productivity]] by keeping your daily actions in harmony with your higher order prioritized goals, visions, and values. in fellow Obsidian creator [Nicole's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6KdfE97y4w) showcasing her yearly planning, she mentions how a yearly theme does not have to be concrete upon the new year. Instead, it can be seen as a guide for you to find out what that theme means to you, something you discover as the year progresses by acting as your north star. So, although I did kind of establish what I believe alignment could look like through this system, it is still fluid and open for adjustments during my monthly and quarterly reviews. *so in my yearly review, I can go to the theme section and write down this definition to remember it. and if i go to my vision board, we can see that we've added our first thing, and i can see it there* *slides* --- # Wheel of life  notes: - Next, I needed a way to ensure that instead of hyperfixating on a few areas of my life and neglecting others, I instead have balance and am attending to all dimensions for a fulfilling life - And to me, that balance can be measured using Ali Abdaal's wheel of life, a holistic life rating and planning system - This is what you will be using to remind yourself on the improvements you want to make in your life - He breaks it down into three key areas with three subcategories in each ---  Credit: Ali Abdaal's Feel Good Productivity notes: - The health area is broken down into body, mind, and soul - The work area is broken down into mission, money, and growth - And the relationships area is broken down into romance, family and friends - As a bonus, there's a bonus rating for joy based on how intrinsically fulfilling and compelling the journey attending to these states have been - So, how do we use this? ---  notes: - Before we start planning, we rate where we currently are on a scale of 1-10 - *as part of my 2023 review I already did this, and this was the result* - Thanks to the holistic visualization, I can see that my different areas were pretty balanced - there wasn't one lagging behind or over the top - I can see that my lowest were body, soul, mission, and growth - And that my highest were friends and joy which make sense %% - In the vault, this rating is calculated based on the 52 weekly ratings throughhout the entire year. - But if you want to do it manually or you don't have data to use, you can do so by importing the template called wheel of life manual chart, and filling out the values there - I just found out about the wheel of life in the end of the year, so I ended up manually rating myself, and this is the result %% --  notes: - Now to actually plan for next year, we think about where we want to ideally be in each area on a scale of 1-10 - I mean technically, you could go backwards if you want to sacrifice other areas for growth in another, or are masochistic - *if we go back to the yearly template, I have a section for the wheel of life where that asks me where I want to be in each area from a scale of 1-10* - *I do want to somewhat improve in each of my health areas just by having good habits, so I'll increase the ratings by one* - *The main focus I want to have is in my work though since I want to prepare for going full-time content creation, so I'm going to be increasing all of these to a 9* - *And I'm content with my relationships, but last year romantic pursuits took up a lot of my time which might conflict with my work goals, so I'm dumpming it* - *As for joy, I'm biased by feel good productivity and my mindset of treating life like a game so it's going to be the only 10* - *Now, we can look at a final result to see if we're content with it, which I personally am. Not everything is at a max, but the areas I want to focus on are higher up. My current total is 78 and my ideal one is 84, so it's a reasonable improvement* - Now, with this in mind, it's time to brainstorm how we can actually work towards this rating throughout the year - And there's two ways you work towards this - There is the macro scale through elaborate goal setting - And the micro scale through habits -- # Yearly Goals notes: To promote balance, we can now think of a goal for each area in our life, which Ali refers to as 12-month celebrations - but of course, trying to transform your life across all dimensions might be too extreme - this is where we turn our ideal ratings into goals or systems that can help us get there - it's okay if they're not all major transformations as that would be unrealistic and will probably lead to burnout. - if you only improved your rating by 1 like I did with my health,, just think of a minor habit that would compound and lead you to your ideal rating by the end of the year. - for ratings that we are just trying to maintain, we can use pareto's principle to think of the 20% of actions that result in 80% of our satisfaction. - But since my current focus is on my career, I'll come up with more ambitious goals there - It's also okay if it's the yearly goal itself is not specific, since we will break it down into smaller goals or habits we can follow *So first, I recommend brainstorming potential goals for each area, then choosing one that you feel like would be beneficial but achievable throughout the year. Prior to this video I already thought of them though, so I'll just share them here for inspiration on how you could plan yours.* Since I live online it took me my last two relationships to get me to put in effort towards my health. My first ex gave me my first workout routines and with them I was able to complete 120 workouts last year, but now I want to also focus on other areas of fitness like flexibility and cardio. My last ex also made me realize how unhealthy I eat, so I want to eat more greens. So my body goal will be, "Be in my biological prime with general fitness + diet" When I think of the mind area I think of my emotional wellbeing, and the easiest way to be happier is to minimize the things under yoru control that make you unhappy. And so, my mind goal will be, "Be mindful of the things that make me unhappy" last year I finished John vervaeke's 50 episode series on awakening from the meaning crisis it was a profound transformational experience and it gave me vocabulary to articulate the philosophical aspect of self-improvement I want to improve my capabilities at the different methods we can do to overcome self deception as seen in my related note [https://publish.obsidian.md/johnmavrick/Overcoming+self-deception](https://publish.obsidian.md/johnmavrick/Overcoming+self-deception), so my soul goal will be to "be more wise to overcome self-deception" Thinking of a mission goal is hard because I have two career-based identities, one as a programmer and one as a personal brand but thankfully at least with programming your company usually has their own set of yearly and periodic goals so I want to focus more on clarifying the uncertain journey of content creation, especially if I plan on going full-time this year. Most brands have a fundamental movement as part of their identity, so I want to work on that by focusing on elaborating on DSA. So, my mission goal will be to earn 60k in revenue from my personal brand "Flesh out DSA through philosophy and workflows" For financial goals, I initially wanted to frugally save so I can retire early. I wanted to achieve financial freedom so I could do what I am passionate about without having to worry about my survival. That was until I questioned why I had to wait for this safety net before I started going all-in with YouTube as my living. So, according to these two sources, the living wage is around $26/hr, so my money goal will be "$50,000 in profit from my personal brand". For growth, I want to keep it simple by going back to the roots of my self-improvement journey by internalizing the knowledge from books. Podcasts and videos are nice, but nothing beats the density of knowledge and mental training from following along in a book. I do want to have a balance with other mediums like podcasts and videos, so I'm going to set my growth goal to "read and make notes on 26 books". For romance, like I said earlier I'm choosing to sacrifice in this area, so I won't set up a habit. One thing I would like to do is just be open to "finding environments where I can find like-minded people, and to just not miss out on any opportunities for connection if I do come across any". For family, my goals here are just to "Continue spending time with cousins and parents, show more gratitude to other relatives". And lastly, for friends I'm very grateful for the people I already have in my life, so my goals here are just to "Make time for weekly calls" I have with them. Next, to make sure we work towards this goal, we can think of keystone habits and goals. And of course, we can create other goals that don't necessarily fit in one of these areas. My non-related goal I want to work on this year is to learn level N5 Japanese just to try out language learning and prepare for when I do visit Japan in the future. For this goal, I'll follow my goal creation workflow on my website. I'll copy the goal, and in the USV I can just open command palette and run "Create Goal Note". Now we can fill out the metadata - Link to my hobbies Objective would be to pass the N5 exam that happens is available to take in December. Why - to try learning a new language and adopt more nuance when watching anime or listening to jpop Feel like: - Appreciation for Japanese culture and a sense of mastery Remember that what you type in these fields will be what you see on a daily basis, so make it meaningful and empowering So, after filling those out we now have a rounded set of goals we have! Now it's time to think on how we can work towards these varying goals. *Slides* --- notes: This is where I like to come up with [[Keystone habits]], - The main consistent action we can take to make gradual progress towards each of our 12-month goals - And if these habits we choose are directly related to our goal, all we have to do is track our completion to see whether we're making progress or not - And just to throw in all the generic self-help lingo: - Just like in atomic habits, think of the 12-month goal as your new identity, and your habit as your way of cultivating and reinforcing that identity - When coming up with habits, think of the 20% of actions that will generate 80% of the desired results. - Unfortunately, remembering 9 habits can be difficult, so I've implemented a habit management and tracking system into the vault as well *If we go back to the vault, we can go to my habits note to see all the active habits I have* But right now, I don't have any, so let's make our first one by creating a habit for my body goal. [[2024 Wheel of life goals#Body#Fitness]] Fitness isn't my biggest priority, so I'm only doing the recommended 41 minutes a day of fitness for optimal cognitive benefit as my goal. So the goal is to do resistance traning 2-3 a week, yoga and a jog once a week, and walking for the remaining days. But instead of creating habits for each one, I'll create one just for hitting that 41 minutes a day. So let's follow my habit workflow on my website :) I can create a habit note by opening up command palette and typing in the habit name, "Daily Fitness". Update metadata fields: - Every day - My body, an existing area note I have. - No goal, so leaving blank, but if you want you can turn the yearly goal into a goal note In the notes section I can type my plan on when I'll do each. Now if we go back to my habits note I can see the habit there! but now we need to actually add this habit somewhere so we are reminded of it when we need to do it. Reference habit note and follow steps. i want to be able to just check off whether I did it without tracking how many minute I spent, so I'm going to follow the task habit. - Add task - Usually do it in the afternoon after my nap, so will add it in my daily template there under an afternoon section - Add tracking [[2024 Wheel of life goals#Diet]] Next, I'm going to do the same for my diet goal of eating greens everyday. [[2024 Wheel of life goals#Journal]] For mind goal, I just want my keystone habit to be journalling my emotions every day using how we feel so I can be more aware. - End of day, already have it Soul - Started watching another philosophy video series from John Vervaeke, and in there he recommends to engage in contemplation to become more wise - After reading a quote you reflect upon what it means, and you do it for 3 times total - So, in the morning, instead of doomscrolling mindless content on my phone I will go to my reader app and read the next quote, thinking about it as I go through my day. - Add a habit for it - I also want to prepare for a 10-day meditation retreat, so going to try and practice mindfulness meditation 5 days a week - Just going to start at 5 minutes, and don't want to force it as a daily habit, but I do want to see how often I decide to do this 5-minute meditation - So then, I'll just put it in my trackers section of my note ![[2024 Wheel of life goals#Writing]] ![[2024 Wheel of life goals#Spending]] ![[2024 Wheel of life goals#Books]] Romance - Nothing until I set up my profile ![[2024 Wheel of life goals#FamilyHabit]] - Weekly call - Don't need to track for similar reasons as family habit And for my japanese goal, I'll just create a habit to do Japanese for 15 minutes [[2024 Wheel of life goals]] If we were to stop here and just follow through on the habits we set, we would already have a decent year. But I personally want some more clarity on some of my goals, and that's where the smaller timeframes come into play. # Quarterly notes: Now that we have direction for the year, we can then start breaking down our 12-month goals in our quarterly review. in here, we think about which 12-month celebrations or yearly goals we want to put emphasis on this quarter. It would be a lot to make major overhauls across all life areas in one quarter, so just choose 1-3 and for the rest just try to maintain it through your keystone habits. The key is prioritization so instead of spreading yourself too thin, you have the resources to pursue the select few. --- notes: So, one of the main areas I want to have more clarity and focus on is my mission of developing Digital Self-Actualization, so I'm going to turn the 12-month celebration into a goal note. Fill out: - Objective, "DSA is defined and becomes the main focus of my personal brand throughout my videos, email courses, and products" - Why, "This is the refined output and synthesis of my passion for growth, learning, and productivity." - Feel like - A sense of purpose in my work as I serve others Key metrics - Technically not key metrics, but since this is a high-order goal I will just brainstorm the different components of this goal: - Finish updated documentation for all other parts of USV - Task and time management philosophy with Akiflow and Toggl Track - Kickstart newsletter - Brainstorm branding changes to reflect this new vision - Landing pages - Email courses - Published notes So, now I can think on what I can work on this quarter. As I develop this philosophy, having an output like my newsletter would be beneficial so I can share updates as I'm working towards my bigger projects. - And for the actual content inside the newsletter, I can first start with updated documentation for the other workflows of the Ultimate Starter Vault like what I'm doing with this. Create a new goal note, start weekly newsletter for DSA. Update metadata fields Objective, create a system to consistently share a weekly newsletter with my subscribers Why, learn in public while buillding DSA for nurturing audience and receiving feedback Key metrics: - Can tie in the writing habit I had as a habit part of this goal - Can create new habit note for weekly habit - Tasks - Create a newsletter system in Obsidian - Creation process - Idea writing pipeline - Have a repurposing plan to also turn it into videos - Finalize my writing habit and scheduling workflow - Content - Create an onboarding sequence for new subscribers - Improve advertising in published notes, landing page, etc - Usage - Turn this new planning system into newsletter editions? - Create an outline as to how I want to slowly develop my new task and time management conent with the weekly newsletter as my foundation - Actually do it Check vision board, can now see goal. Next, I want to specify my progress in Japanese, so I'm going to do so through a guide I came across, the moe way 30 day routine. Unfortunately, that 30 days recommends 3 hours of study time a day which I do not think I have enough time for, so I'm going to break the routine into 30 minute tasks and aim for 30 minutes a day. So, I'm going to create a new goal note. Objective: Finish the 30-day japanese routine Why: Make learning Japanese fun by learning through immersion/. Key results: Progress bar of 30 for each day Just going to use my existing Japanese habit for this Next, the only thing I can think of where want more clarification and growth on is my soul, so I'm going to add a new goal to finish listening to after socrates. I want to expand on the insights from Awakening from the meaning crisis while it's still somewhat fresh in my mind, so I'm going to finish this 24 episode series by watching two series in one. However after a few days of giving these habits and goals a test run before finalizing them for the video, I don't think I woudl be able to have enoguh time, so I'll pre-plan thisgoal for Q2 Objective - Finish all 24 episodes of after socrates, processing notes related to it as well Why - I want to become more wise Key metrics: - Obviously episodes watched - To keep track of inputs, I'm going to be using the input collection note type in my vault, which lets me group together the different inputs in my vault. - I don't know how consistently I can follow this though. So instead of setting up a habit, I will create a progress bar since the time I spend on this will be variable. Ideally if I wanted a consistent pace it would be 2 episodes every week if we think in relation to the 12 week year. I'll also juggle between listening to this and audiobooks during my workouts and walks. - Tasks - Create summary and reflection - Make a list of all the techniques he talks about in the course Check vision board, only see the active ones Okay, now that we have our quarter planned, I'm going to continue breaking down the quarter even more, since I still feel like a quarter is too long of a timeframe to have a specific plan. --- # Monthly On a side note, if all this planning seems like a lot, you're not wrong. This is only because we're planning our whole year out, and you can always not plan as extensively as I am. The next timeframe for planning would be monthly, but it is not usually done as people like to follow the 12 week framework by creating weekly projects from your quarterly goals. I like to have this option just in case since sometimes you might have a short-term goal that doesn't take up a whole quarter, but may still be part of smaller projects. To create a monthly goal, you would follow the same system as before. If we look at my current quarterly goals, the only one I want to break down more right now is my newsletter task, but the brainstormed tasks I have seem more like weekly projects that are already ready to be turned into smaller tasks, so I'm going to skip to the weekly timeframe. --- # Weekly This is where you will be clarifying the tasks you need to do during the week, and is where you can comfortably estimate how much you can get done. Create a project note and follow project workflow *Create new project note* Objective - Set up system and content for newsletter Why - Prepare for making content for task and management workflow - Do something with the $1000 i spent on convertkit subscription lol - [[Creating tasks for a week from projects]] - Brain dump tasks - If you're using Obsidian as your task management system, the USV has built in integration with the tasks plugin - Can click this button to create a task - Can add things like the scheduled date and priority - Then can see it in [[My Tasks]] and the day you scheduled it for - I personally use Akiflow since it has good time management features, so I'm just going to create a new project there and create tasks for it - Idea writing pipeline - Finalize system - Do I need a new newsletter note or can I just use - Finalize my writing habit and scheduling workflow - Post updates on Discord? - How can I connect it to my knowledge and repurpose larger pieces out of it (email course, video) - Create documentation for it - Project -> Brainstorm -> Writing note *Create another project* Advertise newsletter metadata - Upcoming (orange) since I will do this after the system is setup - Link to newsletter goal - Link to personal brand Objective - Integrate newsletter as a key part of my personal brand outputs Why - Get people to actually know that this exists lol - Create an onboarding sequence for new subscribers - Brainstorm structure - Best links - Mention in next video - Improve advertising - Reference in published notes home screen - Update landing page - Share a post on YouTube after I've started doing at least 2 weekly editions --- # Daily notes: This is where you would just look at the tasks and habits you have scheduled in my daily note, or in my case akiflow, and plan your day through prioritization and time management like time blocking. I personally use a different app to do this called Akiflow I'm planning to make videos on so I won't go into it too much, but you can check out my notes on task management in my published vault for inspiration: 🗺 Task management --- # Review and Reflection But there you have it! I've successfully connected my yearly goals to my daily actions, but the journey doesn't end here. I still have to execute, and I still have to find time to review my progress and adjust goals if needed during my weekly, monthly, and quarterly reivews. This video's getting long so I'll save it for a future one. If you want to stay up to date, you can join my weekly newsletter newsletter.johnmavrick.com to receive updates on my progress fleshing out this sytem. # Closing If you're still watching, I appreciate you trusting me with your productivity journey and hope you found my personal workflow helpful. Like mentioned earlier, you can access these workflow notes and slides in my published notes. If you believe in the development of this productivity system and want to help me pursue this full-time, you can support me in 3 different ways: - You can be come a patron and receive undecided benefits - You can try my Ultimate Starter Vault to start using these workflows yourself - Or you can just continue watching my videos and sharing your support to help me know whether I'm doing the right thing This has been John Mavrick, stay mindful.