Planning for the New Year
Looking back on the past year can help us plan to reach our goals for next year.

The year is about to end. This is the time to review the year and see how far you’ve come from last year. Did you hit any new milestones? Did you record any wins? Now is the time to celebrate all that.

On the other hand, the year may not have gone the way you hoped. Maybe you didn’t achieve anything at all. Now is the time to rue whatever went wrong. Only for a moment, however, because there’s no time.

As one year ends, the next begins. What happened this year doesn’t matter anymore. What’s done is done. The only thing that matters is how you’ll do next year. Whether you had a good or bad year, know that next year can be better. But it can also be worse. It all depends on how well you plan.

In this article, I’ll share some tips on planning for the New Year to ensure you never have a better previous year. Let’s do it.

Review the Previous Year

The first step in planning for next year is reviewing this year. If you had a set of goals at the start of the year, evaluation becomes easier. Did you meet your goals? How well do they tie in with your long-term plan? What’s the next step in reaching your long-term targets? You have a clear way to measure failure or success, and a clear direction to help you plot your next course of action.

If this all sounds strange, you’ve probably been living mostly on auto-pilot. That’s no way to go, I promise you, and I’ll try to help you change. Firstly, you have to come up with a long-term vision for yourself. Where do you want to be in the next 5 or 10 years? Did you do anything this year to help you get to that? That’s the key part of any plan, you must first have a goal to reach.

Plan for the New Year

Once you’ve asked yourself the questions and given the answers, it’s time to let go of the past and look forward. There are 5 big parts of planning for next year. If you can nail these 5, the odds of a better next year look great. What to improve, what to discontinue, what to carry over, new things to add, and accountability.

What to improve

You’ve reviewed this year, now what can you improve on in the next year? When I say improve, I mean things you were happy with and need to build on. Maybe it’s your lyricism. This year, you wrote some nice things and you want to build on that for next year. Maybe you started a social media account and now you need ways to scale. Whatever it is, write it down.

What do you want to improve on and how will you do it? Be as practical as possible. I’ll improve on my lyricism by taking a course in poetry, for example. That’s a tangible thing you can look back on at the end of the year to celebrate success or mourn failure.

What to discontinue

You did some nice things you’d like to improve on, but you also did many things you need to shelve. We all have bad habits so don’t feel bad. Be honest with yourself. What did you do this year that you’d rather not continue next year? Maybe you used AI-generated lyrics, but you want to stop so that your lyrics are genuine and personal. Could be that you eat a lot of junk and you want to take better care of yourself next year.

Write down a list of all the bad habits you want to stop. You’ll need to write them down on a sheet of paper and have them pasted somewhere you can see so you never forget.

What to carry over

There are things to stop and things to do better, but there are some you just want to continue, to carry over into the next year. You don’t always have to improve on things, sometimes you can just maintain. For example, maybe you did some rebranding and the new one has been a hit with your audience. Let it be. You don’t see large brands changing their logos or mottos every year. If you have a logo, keep it at least long enough for it to become a household image.

Another thing to carry over could be something you planned to do this year but never got to do it. So if you planned to get a new laptop but the year is up and you still haven’t gotten one, you can carry that plan over into next year.

New things to add

This is where things start getting interesting. Once you’re done sorting everything you did this year, it’s time to add new things for next year to your plan. Are there any things you didn’t do this year that you want to do next year? Maybe you’ve never performed live in front of an audience before. You can plan for it.

Trying new things will always be the best way to expand, so this is a critical part of your plan for next year. What new boundaries will you break? Which of your fears will you overcome? Which new milestone will you hit? This is where you answer such questions.

Accountability

If you do everything else but neglect this, you’ll probably end up with a long list of unachieved plans by the end of next year. You need someone or a group of people to be accountable to. It could be a group of fellow indie artists or a mentor, the point is that there’s always someone to hold you to your plan.

So write out your goals and action plans. Then have someone hold you to your word. This will improve your efficiency by a mile.

Final Thoughts

Planning for a new year is no easy feat. It takes days, sometimes weeks. One mistake many people make is to wait for the year to start before they start planning for it. Don’t wait until January 1st to start planning because it's best to hit the ground running. Start planning now so that as soon as the year begins, you're ready for execution.

Here's a tip. I'm your 12-month plan, give yourself a month to evaluate and plan, and 11 months to execute. Then rinse and repeat.

Good luck next year, my friend.