Is your New Year’s Resolution “ill formed”? (2024 Goals Setting Template)

Key Takeaways

• I use a reflective approach to set better goals in 2024
• This involves three steps: 10-year-plan, wheel of life, 12 months celebration
• I use ChatGPT to calibrate my 10-year-plan
• How I build my wheel of life
• Framing goals as 12 months celebration
• Free templates you can try out for yourselves!

Here’s an unsurprising stat: Searches for New Year’s Resolutions spike at the end of every year.

If my personal experience is anything like yours, it’s that New Year’s Resolutions fail 90% of the time. Why?

In my case, I’ve realized that it’s not my lack of commitment, but that perhaps that the New Year’s Resolution itself was ill formed in the first place.

In other words, the goals I’ve set were not meaningful enough, they were simply not worth achieving in the long-run (despite how appealing it initially seemed).

So how do I figure out what goals are truly meaningful for me, what goals are worth investing the next 12 months (or more) of my life?

My working solution is to build a reflective approach to goal setting. Here’s how I do it in 3 steps:

1. Using ChatGPT to calibrate a 10-year-plan
2. Building a Wheel of Life
3. Changing the money question: What do I want to be celebrating?

Step 1: Using ChatGPT to calibrate a 10-year-plan

A few years ago, I used to find this exercise exhausting and wholly unproductive, because it’s just too daunting!

It takes a whole lot of imagination to visualize what life I wanted to build in 10 years, let alone the fact that my plan would change significantly every single year, making my so-called ‘10-year-plan’ impossible to track.

How the would I know what I’ll be doing in 10 years when I don’t even know what to get for lunch? - I always thought to myself.

But with the help of my bestie ChatGPT, I’m able to turn this exercise into one that is meaningful, actionable, and most importantly, trackable.

Here’s the prompt and initial answers:

The initial prompt

ChatGPT’s answer

The first output was a series of steps for me to follow, each steps including 2-3 questions, eventually arriving at a finalized 10-year-plan.

Here are the first two steps:

The first important question

I went on to answer it’s first important question ‘What are my core values’?

Here, I simply inserted my personal core values, which were calibrated in a different ChatGPT conversation. You can find my core values calibration prompt in this LinkedIn post.

The conversation went on from there, step-by-step, until I arrived at a finalized 10-year-goal that I felt happy with.

Here’s an example excerpt of the final output:

I find fulfillment in teaching others and contributing in education. In 10 years, I’ll be spending 90% of my working hours mentoring and nurturing talent growth at my company, Criclabs. I’ll also be involved deeply in education, either in building a learning platform, or interacting with students throughout the country on a regular basis.

Here’s how this method breaks down the biggest barriers of the 10-year-plan exercise:

1. Become the interviewee. You can just sit back and think without needing to come up with the questions yourself.
2. Prioritizing the easy way. The conversation forces you to prioritize by presenting all your goals in front of you at the end.
3. Simply clinical. ChatGPT neatly organizes your answers for you and presents you with your goals written concisely to refer back to in the future.

Step 2: Building a Wheel of Life

I’ve come across the ‘Wheel of Life’ concept a few years back, but have always dismissed it as ‘Life Coach woo woo’. But I’ve come to realize that my unfair prejudice towards this exercise came at my own expense.

After trying it for the first time this year, it’s helped me gain a much more grounded understanding of where different aspect of my life stand in relation my 10-year-plan.

Here’s how I do it.

Three main pillars in life

First, I created simple pie chart and split it into three parts, representing the three main pillars in my life:

• Health
• Relationships
• Work

Three areas in each pillar

I then split each of theme into three areas in life and create a web chart.

Health

• Physical health
• Mental wellbeing
• Joy

Relationships

• Romance
• Family
• Friends

Work

• Personal growth
• Money
• Mission (Career)

For me, ‘joy’ stands for my ability to appreciate the small things in life and celebrate serendipity on a day-to-day basis, which is why it’s instrumental to both my physical and mental health.

Finally, I rated them in a score of 1-10, based on how on track these areas were towards achieving my 10-year-plan.

With each rating, I also write a short reflection on their state of affairs in the past year.

Step 2: What do I want to be celebrating in 12 months?

This is where the 2024 goals start to take shape. But instead of framing them as goals, I asked myself what I’d like to be celebrating in 12 months based on the three main pillars in life:

• Health
• Work
• Relationships

Here’s the main question I posed to myself:

Based on the 2023 Wheels of Life, what do I want to be celebrating in 12 months, while enjoying every step along the way?

With this framing, I am forcing myself to make SMART goals to look forward to in December of 2024.

Here’s an example from the ‘Health’ category:

But what’s the catch?

With, these three steps, setting my goals has been a lot more productive than previous years, allowing me to reflect and set goals that are more aligned with where I want to be in the long-run.

But they aren’t perfect.

For one, ChatGPT conversations can be inconsistent at times, and correcting the AI to keep it on track can become daunting.

It also takes a lot of time to complete this process. Three hours over the course of two days in total in mu case. But with the end result giving a lot more clarity on my goals, the time investment was well worth it.

Finally, I’ve also committed myself to review my goals on a regular basis. Once every month, I’ll be reviewing my 2024 goals as part of my daily journal. This is a big commitment, and a habit which isn’t easy to form. But personally, journaling has been such a game-changer for my daily energy-levels, drive and mental health, so it’s a habit I’d be more than happy to commit going forward in 2024.

My 2024 goals calibration template

After clicking on the link below, you can duplicate my Notion template and customize however you’d like.

Here’s the template!

• Toon’s 2024 goals calibration template

How to use the template

1. Where to start

2. Complete the goals of life

3. Complete the 12 month celebration categories

Journaling template (Coming soon!)

Journaling is the last essential peace in helping me set effective goals in 2024.

It’s is instrumental in keeping me on track with my goals, while also giving me time to reflect on my mental health and recuperate my emotions on a daily basis.

I hope to write another post explaining how to use it effectively soon!

Here’s a sneak peak into my journaling template.

The collection

Calendar view

Daily questions and reflections

Credits & references

My 2024 reflection is an accumulation of ideas and methodology from a wide range of people. The templates, methodologies and protocols of these three individuals stand out in particular:

• Easlo (Wheels of Life template)
• Ali Abaal (12 Months Celebration)
• Andrew Huberman (Journaling protocols)