Professional Documents
Culture Documents
alexvermeer.com/8760hours
8,760 hours
how to get the most out of next year
This guide is free and does not contain any affiliate links. Share it with anyone you think would find it useful.
It falls under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Content by Alex Vermeer. Design and layout by Jimmy Rintjema.
This is version 2 of this guide.
Disclaimer: This guide does not contain legal, medical, or any other type of advice. Please be safe and responsible!
8,760 hours | 2
Table of Contents
Introduction........................................... 4
Yearly calendar.........................................................20
Ongoing reviews........................................................20
Prioritizing....................................................................21
I The tools................................................. 8
Acknowledgements..................................................22
Additional resources..............................................22
Version 2.......................................................................22
Feedback.......................................................................22
8,760 hours | 3
Introduction
Never put
off till
tomorrow
what you
can do the
day after
tomorrow.
Mark Twain
8,760 hours | 4
2See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.
I, for one, plan to live to be at least 1,000 years old, but
thats a story for a different guide.
They are not really your highest priorities, and they inevitably fall to the
wayside.
This guide outlines my process for avoiding all of these shortcomings and trying to
make some real changes over the next year.
The start of a new year is useful. There
tends to be a positive change can happen!
atmosphere that explains why people make
their new years resolutions in the first
place. A new year. A clean slate. A time to
make some changes. Lets still do that, but
lets do it right.
ready.
for you.
8,760 hours | 6
A quick personal
introduction
For the purposes of this guide it is sufficient
to say that I enjoy reading and thinking
about various topics ranging from understanding how our minds work, thinking
clearly, improving productivity and organization, maximizing my positive impact on
the world, learning cool things, resolving
internal conflicts, and generally improving
my life as much as possible.
Life is short, and Ill be damned if I dont at
8,760 hours | 7
I The tools
Before we go ahead and do
any life planning we need
some tools to help us out.
The process outlined in this guide is flexible. You can easily adapt it to use whatever
tools you prefer. I always require the following:
Privacy
Time
For things like outlining, big picture thinking, and connecting ideas, mind mapping is
vastly superior to linear note taking, whether its with pen and paper or a software on
your computer.
Mindmanager by Mindjetexpensive
but powerful. (This is my current program of choice, though I have some
reservations.3)
If at any point in this guide you would rather use a different set of toolssuch as paper
and pen rather than mind mapping softwarethen do it!
8,760 hours | 8
Your deeper, underlying, fundamental values and wants. Your philosophy of life. Your
sense of purpose, vision, and meaning.
Contribution & Impact
How you give value to the world, make a
difference, and have a positive impact.
Location & Tangibles
Your physical presence in the world. Where
you are in the world. Your living situation.
Your stuff. What you own and why. Your
material sufficiency. Your mobility.
4 I keep an up-to-date list of these categories at https://
alexvermeer.com/life-areas/.
Your learning, education, and mental development. Your talents and skills. Your
skill development, practicing, and training.
Social Life & Relationships
The intimate relationship(s) you have or
want to have. The quality of your relationships. Your home life and relationships with
family members. Your friend circles and
social experiences. Your club, organization,
and community memberships.
Emotions & Well-Being
Your general feeling about life, optimism
8,760 hours | 9
Now that we have the tools we can begin the actual review and planning.
8,760 hours | 10
You don't need to get into thorough detail yet, as that comes later.
I spend at least a few minutes brainstorming (using mind maps)
answers to each of these questions. Once I have around ten items
I move onthey key here isnt to find 10 things, but to get all the
obvious things out of your head, and quickly.
Accomplishments?
Failures?
8,760 hours | 11
Key life metrics such as income, quality of relationships, amount of donations, etc.?
What single thing, if successfully performed, would have the biggest impact
here?
Am I making a difference?
Is my life cluttered?
Am I engaged?
8,760 hours | 13
Am I a good friend?
Am I enjoying life?
8,760 hours | 14
Do I practice self-compassion?
This whole process can easily take several hours. Once Ive gone through every area I do a
second pass to catch the things I inevitably missed on the first pass.
The end result is a massive mind map with a complete picture of the current status of your
life. The following figure gives my Health & Fitness review from last year as an example.
When you are satisfied with your awareness of the present state of your life, you are ready
to move on to planning.
8,760 hours | 15
Since I have already done this for several years, nowadays I tend to review my
existing mind map and make any changes
as needed. Though, it is important to view
information from previous years with fresh
eyes, and keep only what is compelling and
meaningful right now.
Dont fill up a mind map with things you
would like, that would be nice. For example
dont put Make $1,000,000,000 per year
unless that really is a goal youre striving to
reach.
I go through all areas of my life and review how I would want them to look in a
perfectly ideal world. What kind of career
would I have? How much money would I
make? What would my social circles look
like? How much positive impact would I
have on the world? What important problems would I have solved?
8,760 hours | 16
Are there any specific projects to finish or goals to accomplish in this area?
Yearly Theme
It may help to start off with a theme in mind for the upcoming
year. This next year can be your Year of _______________. This
could be a specific accomplishment (finish school, run a marathon) or
a general goal (learn about cognitive psychology).
For example, my 2011 theme of the year was independence because I wanted to take a break from my job, do some backpacking
in South America, become lighter (sell or get rid of most of my
possessions) and free myself from all debt.9
Having the theme helped remind me what I wanted the main thrust
of my year to be.
If your life is in a state of flux or uncertainty then this may not be
useful. In the first few years of doing this, my yearly theme ended
up having no bearing on my projects and actions; life was constantly changing, as were my interests and goals. If you expect that
to happen to you, consider doing quarterly or monthly themes, or
dropping this altogether.
Setting a Focus
There are a lot of different aspects of your life. Any breakdown of
life areas could be broken down further if we wanted to, but then
it may get unwieldy.
We have only a limited amount of time, so we need to decide what
we will focus on for the upcoming year.
Now you should take some time to figure out what the most important areas of your life you want to focus on in the next year.
I like to rate each category out of seven in terms of importance.
9 It was a resounding success!
This should help give an idea of what parts you think are less ideal
than others.
Also, dont forget about the Hamming Questions mentioned earlier, which can be very useful for identifying priorities and important focus areas.
8,760 hours | 17
things. Remember, if you end up accomplishing those over the next year then you
can always add more, but do not bite off
more than you can chew.
TravelGet off this continent and experience another culture; expand my knowledge and awareness of humanity; live out
of my backpack; meet cool people; have
fun. [Success! I backpacked through the
highlands of Ecuador for seven weeks at
the end of 2011.]
Write 100,000 wordsGet some practice
writing; complete NaNoWriMo; write
regular blog posts. [Partial success: I
wrote over 100,000 words and completed
NaNoWriMo, but did not write nearly as
many blog posts as planned.]
Red point a 5.12c climbing routeLead climb
a 5.12c difficulty climbing route, using as
many attempts as needed. [Failed: spent
all my time bouldering (shorter problems,
no rope) rather than lead climbing. In this
case I dropped the goal half-way through
the year because my interests changed.]
8,760 hours | 18
Expectancy Value
Motivation =
Impulsiveness Delay
For each of your major goals (and as many sub-goals or sub-projects as you see fit) address all of the following things.
What this shows is that we are more motivated (less likely to procrastinate) when either our expectancy of success or how much we
value a task are higher. Likewise, if we can decrease our impulsiveness (in short: our inability to focus on one thing) and decrease the
delay until we are rewarded or a task is accomplished, we will be
more motivated.
This comes from The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel, avail-
What will success look like? How will the world be different if
this succeeds?
8,760 hours | 19
Addressing Uncertainties
What are the uncertainties involved? If a
major goal is to begin writing full-time, an
uncertainty may be, My writing wont be
good enough.
These constantly creep up in the back of my
mind, and having already addressed them at
the start of a project is very helpful.
For each uncertainty, write out the following:
1. What you think could happenIll be a
terrible writer.
2. Your reasons for thinking thisIm not
a pro; I dont have much experience; there
are lots of better writers out there.
3. The worst case scenarioI wont become a full-time writer, and Ill have to revert to flipping burgers.
4. The realityCome on, Ive made it this
far, my writing cant be that bad; everyone
has to start somewhere.
5. Your action plan for dealing with it
Practice, practice, practice; get feedback;
read good writers and examine how they
write; write 1,000 words per day.
Creating Sub-Projects
Major goals are often exactly that: major.
Meaning, they can probably be broken
down into smaller, more manageable goals
and projects. Review your major goals and
break them down if possible.
Yearly calendar
I use a compact single-page year calendar
from David Seah, available at http://davidseah.com/compact-calendar/. This holds
my big-picture for the upcoming year. On
it I place things like:
8,760 hours | 20
Ongoing reviews
Monthly and Quarterly Reviews
Every month I spend at least a few hours
to do a big picture review of all my projects
and progress for the last month. Plan now to
do them by scheduling them on your yearly
calendar, because they are very important.
Am I on track?
Your major goals, with concrete details and plans for achieving success.
Prioritizing
One of the most important ideas to take
away from this guide and this chapter in
particular is the value of prioritizing. We
have limited time, and may thing we want
to do with it, so we must prioritize. If youre
finding yourself too busy or stressed, then
reduce your commitments and goals. Generally
speaking, busyness (the stressful kind) is a
choice, and I choose to avoid it.
v
8,760 hours | 21
Busyness is a
lack of priorities.
Tim Ferriss
Acknowledgements
Chris Guillebeau is a big inspiration for writing this guide, and my
life review and planning process primarily came about from reading
about his yearly review process.
Special thanks to Jimmy Rintjema for creating the new and improved formatting for this guide and making it more readable and
shareable.
Additional resources
Im a big fan of much of Cal Newports writings, many of which are
relevant to the topic of this guide, including his books So Good They
Cant Ignore You and Deep Work.
I recommend the series of articles called The Science of Winning at
Life by Luke Muehlhauser.
The Compact Calendar comes from David Seah is available on his
site.
Version 2
This is the second version of this guide, updated from the original I
wrote back in 2012. The main changes are as follows:
An overhaul of the life areas, categories, breakdowns, prompting questions, and metrics.
Feedback
Any and all feedback is always welcome. Was this guide useful? Did
you have to heavily adapt it for your own uses? Let me know at
alex@alexvermeer.com.
8,760 hours | 22