How To Plan Your Best Year In 2025

Goal setting, New Year’s resolutions, morning and evening routines are all just ways to align your daily actions with your bigger values and life directions so you can plan your best year. They don’t have to be rigid and you don’t ‘fail’ if you don’t achieve everything on your list. (Actually last year I held a Celebration of Failure in December because I didn’t tick a single one of my goals for the year. That was a great party and we shared meaningful stories. And I changed the way I designed my goals this year.) It’s a chance to assess your values, priorities, your life or business direction, and make some efficient decisions about how to spend your time so you don’t have to decide again every day. It’s decluttering for your brain. Design systems not goals!

This year I’ve been juggling two small businesses, business and leadership trainings, events and holidays, homeschooling my teenager, hosting over 40 Couchsurfers and Workawayers who need direction in which garden and house tasks to work on, new relationships, supporting friends and neighbours, martial arts four nights a week, plus running a few bonus events like perimenopause gatherings. I also had a major health crisis that took me out of action for about two months. Despite this, I’ve rebuilt my capacity, set solid foundations for my business and have made a lot of progress on my three annual goals because I had an excellent system for the year.

I like the idea of slow productivity. Human connection, stewardship of non human life and right livelihood are more important to me than money. Money should be a tool for a good life and a flow of value, not a force for stress and disconnection or justification for harm to people or planet. When I’m looking for business and leadership content, I find a lot of it jarring and out of alignment to my values. Bro marketing, no thanks. Three authentic sources that make sense to me are Sam Garcia, Simone Grace Seol and Kate Ruby Aroha. I found the 10 Hour Work Week helpful too.

I have some apps and digital project management tools but I still use an old fashioned paper diary as my main time management and life planning tool. I used to buy a cheap small diary every year but for the last few years I’ve designed my own so that I can have space for specific things like homeschool tasks, habit tracking, moon cycles, local Noongar seasons and monthly goal setting. I’m really happy with where it’s at now.

I’ve been printing it undated because it’s much easier to create but this month I made a dated version for 2025. Last year I counted the pages wrong and accidentally printed only six months by mistake (it’s a week to a spread and I counted a week to a page when I printed it). I had to print another six months in June! Oops. So I spent hours dating the pages… and when I printed it out, the printing lady printed it with the first half of the week on the right and the second half of the work on the left side. Agh! Don’t you love printing? I’m tempted to reprint it but the permie in me doesn’t want to waste the trees.

I watch and read a lot about behaviour change, motivation and neuroscience so I’ve incorporated a lot of ideas based on this. For example, your brain gets dopamine by completing tasks or shapes so lists, progress bars and habit trackers are useful. Keeping your priorities visible and breathing life into your vision helps, so some structure around regular reviews is helpful. And celebrating your achievements helps your brain get a dopamine hit and feel motivated to continue, as well as keeping you in the bigger picture to see that you are making progress. I added a nerdy page of self-care strategies organised by brain chemical – this is one of my favourite pages. Regular gratitude helps your brain feel a sense of meaning and satisfaction, so I have this in my diary weekly and monthly. I read about the Hour of Power somewhere, tackling important but unpleasant tasks to stop them looming over your head, so I added this to my weekly layout. The 10 Hour Work Week, Tiny Habits and Atomic Habits are all great resources for designing habits that stick.

I haven’t split the whole thing into quarters like the 12 Week Year or Full Focus Planner but I added some quarterly planning pages to the 2025 version. It’s helpful to be able to go from macro to micro and back again. I’m looking at my five year goals currently so I can get a longer perspective. Aligning your daily tasks to your weekly, monthly, annual or five year goals means that you spend your time and energy on the things that are the most important, not the most urgent or easiest.

I’m currently going back over the Holistic Decision Making map I made for my Talk Your Peace business. I did the first version in texta on the back of an old movie poster and I’ve added pencil details. I want to either redraw it all in colour on paper this month or make a digital version that I can edit easily. I learned this big picture thinking framework from Dan Palmer, bless him, at the Canberra Australasian Permaculture Convergence in 2018. I find it really useful to have all this core stuff laid out visually on one page. Basically it’s values in the centre, core statements around those, actions around those, and underneath is your ‘resource base’ or foundations – what needs to be present for everything else to work. Another way to look at risk management but framing it in positive terms rather than negative.

I decided to add a planner page to visually track my periods last year because I used to keep track of this before I got pregnant but I got out of the habit. It was unexpectedly useful when I had two months of bleeding nonstop to have 18 months of my cycles recorded so I could see clearly when my periods had suddenly doubled in length in the lead up to this. You can also track your cycle on an app but make sure you have a back up because it’s good to be able to look back a year or more to see larger patterns. It’s especially useful if you’re either planning pregnancy, avoiding pregnancy or in perimenopause; which is to say, most people with a cycle. You can also use cycle tracking to plan activities that align with your natural monthly ebb and flow of energy, inwards and then outwards.

I like to know where I am in the moon cycles too so I have a little circle on each day that I can colour in with the current moon phase. This informs my activities during the day and I can decide if I want to do a full moon or dark moon ritual.

Having a diary can help you stay on top of tasks that recur at long intervals like monthly, quarterly or annually. I’m starting to make lists of homeschool and garden tasks that happen every year so I expect them and can plan around them. The fruit trees need netting in November, the garlic needs harvesting and processing every December, I write reports for my son in January and July. I’ve given myself monthly tasks like write an old-fashioned letter, do a moon ritual and write a family newsletter article. Every month there’s one or two tasks that change (like tax return, reviewing insurances, birthday fun). This helps me have a sense of seasonal flow through the year.

I’ve included things I want to record, like the names of all the guests who stay with us, whether I recorded my son’s learning that week, books to read, movies to watch and home educator moderator annual meeting notes. I have a simple few pages of annual priorities, goal setting and my top three detailed goals for the year. Then I made quarterly check-in pages with a visual overview of my eight main life sectors, monthly goals and tasks and an annual review at the end of the year. Each week, I have daily spaces, a meal planning space, homeschool task list, habit tracker that I use for homeschool core learning, hour of power, moon phases, Noongar season, weekly goals, weekly tasks, need of the week, lessons, gratitude and notes section.

I haven’t used every single section every week but it has generally kept me on track and aligned with my main priorities. It gives me one space to go to to check events, and it’s the main place I write down holidays, appointments, birthdays, work shifts, guests, etc. Some months I didn’t do the monthly review on the turn of the month but next year I’ll add this as a task on the dated pages so that I remember. I did fill in all the monthly review pages and I’m looking forward to doing the yearly review pages soon. Regular reviews will help you course correct and realign before you get way off track.

If you want more in-depth annual review and planning to close this year out and start the next one fresh, check out the free Year Compass printable! This would complement my planner really well. It looks like a great activity to do with friends.

As well as dating next year’s planner, I’m adding pages for quarterly planning, monthly possibilities, morning and evening routine templates, and weekly reminders to do something fun. Deep focus work requires deep rest as well, so I want to make play and looking after myself visible in my week as well as the left-brain tasks. I didn’t actually use the ‘not to do’ space even though it was a cool idea, so I’m taking that part out.

To help me stay on track and be able to access deep focus states without interruption (it takes your brain about 20 minutes to get back on track after each interruption), I also made a set of ‘work mode’ cards and a sign to stick to my bedroom door for my son and guests to let them know I’m in a focus work mode and when I’ll be free. This was inspired by a Kate Ruby Aroha podcast episode. I chose six modes: light work, deep focus, learn, connect, rest, create, fun. I painted the backs with ink in a design that reminded me of that state.

Another tool I used this year is making a vision board. I used a cork pinup board I got from the tip shop and a stack of magazines and catalogues. I spent a few days cutting out pictures and words of what I wanted in my life this year. I arranged them into similar groups, pinned them on and hung the board in my bedroom where I see it every day. I like having a tangible vision board, rather than a digital one that I don’t see every day. I do use an app for affirmations though, called ‘Gratitude’. There’s space for making a vision board on that that I have played with but I don’t look at it regularly.

To organise the house and garden jobs for Workaway guests and make them visible in a central location, I had one of my Workawayers paint blackboard circles in the kitchen. I jot down anything as I think of it in chalk, sorted into inside jobs, outside jobs and cooking. If I’m leaving people alone for the day, I’ll talk them through what needs doing and then star the relevant jobs on the board. Before this I was using recycled envelopes to write lists, which is harder to keep track of especially long-term tasks in the weeks leading up to guests arriving.

I have a separate garden planner journal that a friend gave me as a gift. By far the most useful feature is a dotted page that I’ve used to draw a mud map of my garden beds, labelled with letters, and then write out my crop rotations so that I give the soil a few years between plantings with the same plant family. I’ve added a couple of dotted pages at the back of my planner that you can use for garden planning or anything else you like.

I usually have a planning week between Christmas and New Year, or early in January, when my son is at his father’s and I have the headspace to do some big picture thinking and design systems. I write his school report for the year, do some self care, print my new planner, review last year’s goals and set new ones.

This year I’ve already set my 2025 business goals and tweaked the planner ready to print. I’m going to invite some friends over for a life planning session with Year Compass and look at some five year goals. I want to share some tools like writing out your ideal day in detail (I did this about six years ago, and my day now is pretty close to that dream!), writing a letter to your future self, vision boarding and making a digital ‘command centre’ for your morning/evening routine with everything you need (idea from Muchelle B).

I also like the idea of having a simple and a complex version of your morning routine, which reminds me of the MVD (minimum viable day). Currently my simple morning routine would be eat breakfast, take iron tablets, feed chickens and ducks, water garden if it’s hot. My extended version is the above plus daily reading from my daybook, write one page in my journal, study Japanese on Renshuu while I brush my teeth and a five minute dumbbell workout.

If you want your own permie business planner so you can plan your best year, you can download a digital copy here for $25. There’s a homeschool version as well. It took me days to create this and I’ve made at least four evolutions of this planner now. Every year it gets better and it’s packed full of neuroscience-based goal setting, self-care and life design!

How do you like to plan your life? Do you have favourite digital tools or systems? Let me know.