8760-hours plan for new year
8,760 HOURS
how to get the most out of next year
alexvermeer.com/8760hours
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8,760 HOURS | 2
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8,760 HOURS
how to get the most out of next year
8,760 HOURS | 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .......................................... 4
W!" #$%& %' %$$? ......................................................... 4
Y()* $+,- +& % &)'.!-$$ (“$+,- +. .!(*'”) ............. 5
T!- #*(/$-0 1+'! &-1 "-%*’. *-.($)'+(&........ 5
H(1 '( ).- '!+. 2)+3- ............................................... 5
W!( '!+. +. ,(* ............................................................ 6
A 4)+56 #-*.(&%$ +&'*(3)5'+(& ........................... 6
I THE TOOLS ................................................ 8
A &('- (& 0+&3 0%##+&2 ........................................... 8
T!- T1-$7- L+,- %*-%. ................................................ 9
II A SNAPSHOT OF YOUR LIFE ..............11
T!- +&+'+%$ (7-*7+-1 ...................................................11
G-''+&2 .#-5+,+5: "()* #*-.-&' *-%$+'" ..............11
III THE NEXT 8,760 HOURS ....................16
Y()* +3-%$ ,)')*-......................................................16
T!- &-8' 8,760 !()*. ...............................................16
Y()* 0%9(* 2(%$. ..................................................... 17
IV OPTIMIZING FOR SUCCESS .............19
T!- #*(5*%.'+&%'+(& -4)%'+(& .............................19
B)+$3+&2 (& '!- 0%9(* 2(%$. ...............................19
Y-%*$" 5%$-&3%*........................................................20
O&2(+&2 *-7+-1........................................................20
P*+(*+'+:+&2 ...................................................................21
RESOURCES AND THANKS ................. 22
I, "() ,()&3 '!+. ).-,)$... ....................................22
A56&(1$-32-0-&'. .................................................22
A33+'+(&%$ *-.()*5-..............................................22
V-*.+(& 2 ......................................................................22
F--3/%56 ......................................................................22
8,760 HOURS | 4
INTRODUCTION
This is a guide for plan-
ning the next 8,760
hours—one full year—of
your life. More import-
antly, it is about creating a
detailed plan and optimiz-
ing for success, based on
an understanding of what
works.
For the last few years this system has
worked very well for me. My hope is that
you will find it useful as well.
Many of the ideas here are not original to
me. This guide builds off many hours of
reading many articles and blogs about pro-
ductivity, goals, and the brain, which are at-
tributed when possible.1
The end result is a system for keeping your-
self constantly moving towards your goals
over the next year, and constantly staying
on track.
1 A big early influencers is Chris Guillebeau who has
written about his yearly planning process.
WHY PLAN AT ALL?
Want to learn an instrument? Want to
write a book? Want to beat every computer
game ever designed? Want to cure can-
cer? Want to have a positive impact on the
world and an impactful career? Do you have
something to protect, something that gets
you out of bed in the morning?
Whatever your primary motivations are in
life, you won’t get anywhere by waiting for
something to happen. We plan because we
have sh*t we want to do with our lives.
Humans do not think strategically by de-
fault. Even when we know what our goals
are—and we often don’t—we are still bad at
asking things like:
➙ What exactly do I want to achieve?
➙ How will I measure success?
➙ Am I actively seeking out information
about this?
➙ Can I break this down into more man-
ageable parts?
➙ Is this really my goal? Am I con-
strained by fears or uncertainties?
“NEVER PUT
OFF TILL
TOMORROW
WHAT YOU
CAN DO THE
DAY AFTER
TOMORROW.”
MARK TWAIN
8,760 HOURS | 5
Our brains are not optimized for achieving
our larger goals in life. They are sculpted by
evolution for survival and reproductive abil-
ities, but not much else!
We need systems and processes in place to
help us get around these evolutionary “abil-
ities” so that we can get the most out of our
lives.
YOUR LIFE IN A NUTSHELL
!“LIFE IS SHORT”"
If you live to be 80 years old, which is about
the first-world average life expectancy, then
you will experience about 30,000 days or
700,000 hours of life (if we take out sleeping
time the number drops to more like 450,000
hours).2
The point is that we have limited time and
we must choose how to spend it. Unfortu-
nately, from personal experience, I rarely
take the time to consciously do this.
The only way to decide what to work on is
to prioritize. That’s why I take a big picture
approach to life and break down the big pic-
ture into present year and day actions.
This is part of my motivation for calling this
2 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.
I, for one, plan to live to be at least 1,000 years old, but
that’s a story for a different guide.
guide “8,760 hours” rather than “one year.”
Even if there is a sense that life is incredibly
short, there are still 8,760 hours in a single
year! That is a lot of time to get some real
stuff done.
Given that our natural life-planning skills
are… lacking, this guide hopes to help us
overcome that limitation and get things
done anyway.
We need specific goals and a concrete plan
for obtaining them that is optimized for
success. We need a clear picture of our lives
and where our priorities lie. What better
time to do some fresh planning than at the
start of a new year?
THE PROBLEM WITH NEW
YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
We've all made them and we've all failed
to achieve them. The number of times I've
resolved to take up regular exercise or stop
procrastinating—and failed miserably—is
embarrassing.
New Year’s resolutions often have at least
one of the following problems:
➙ They are vague, non-specific goals like
“be fit,” “be nice to people,” or “read
more books.”
➙ They are overly pessimistic and stem
from self-critical admonitions for still
not doing That Thing you always
wanted to do or felt you ought to do—
“I’m such a slacker, but this year will
be different.”
➙ They take on too much at once—“I’m
committing to these ten big, vague,
life-changing things and start them all
on January 1st.”
➙ They are not really your highest pri-
orities, and they inevitably fall to the
wayside.
This guide outlines my process for avoid-
ing 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 year’s resolutions in the first
place. A new year. A clean slate. A time to
make some changes. Let’s still do that, but
let’s do it right.
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE
I’m going to illustrate what it is that I do,
and I invite you to follow along.
First I do an initial overview of my life. This
helps get the mind ready to do the whole
process and starts me thinking about what
8,760 HOURS | 6
I’m doing with my life, where my priorities
are, what I want—in general, and roughly
over the next year.
Next I review, in detail, the state of all
areas of my life, and specifically any major
projects completed in the past year or still
underway.
Then I spend some time thinking about the
ideal future—how I want my life to look.
Finally I extract from my ideals what I want
to focus on for the next 8,760 hours (1 year)
of my life, and optimize those plans for
success by taking advantage of several mo-
tivation and anti-procrastination tools and
tricks.
I try to spend at least a few days using this
process at the end of every calendar year.
The more time you spend on it the more
value you will likely get out of it. Also,
spreading it over several days gives the
mind lots of time to process what it’s think-
ing about, which I find useful.
Before we get started, I will mention what
this guide is not for:
➙ Determining what your bigger goals
in life should be—this is something I
can’t get into here, and something I
highly recommend you spend some
time thinking about if you haven’t al-
ready.
➙ An excuse when things don’t work
out. “But I tried. I even used this
guide!” You are responsible for your
life; if things don’t work out then fig-
ure out why and do something about
it.
The number one way to use this guide
wrong is to be dishonest with yourself,
whether intentionally or accidentally. You
need to be willing to face yourself, dirt and
all. If you’re not up for that, then file this
guide away and continue on with life as you
see fit.
WHO THIS IS FOR
I’m very analytic, and this guide strongly re-
flects that. In the process of reviewing my
past year and planning the upcoming year
I break down my life into a bunch of areas,
repeatedly mind map my goals and pro-
jects in great detail, develop ways to track
my progress, and try to optimize my life for
success.
The whole process is very analytical and
systematic, and won’t work for everybody.
There is some risk with trying to optimize
other peoples’ lives, because we don't all
work the same. People are complex. This
process, which I enjoy, might be unpleasant
for you.
But even if you find specific parts of this
guide useless, I believe you can still get some
value out of it.
A large part of the reason this works for me
is because I enjoy using it. If you don’t like
using your system then it will not survive
for long. If at any point there is a part of the
process that you do not want to do or would
like to modify, then please do.
No matter what, do what works for you. The
whole point of this process is to help you
get the most out of the next year. As you
follow or deviate from this process, don’t
forget the reason why you’re reading this in
the first place
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 under-
standing how our minds work, thinking
clearly, improving productivity and organ-
ization, 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 I’ll be damned if I don’t at
8,760 HOURS | 7
least try to make the most of it.
Planning out my year and optimizing it for success are natural actions in the pursuit of my
interests.
If you want to know more, the best place is on my website (alexvermeer.com), which has a
bunch of info on how I run my life, what major projects I’m working on, and what I’m cur-
rently reading, among other things.repetition intensity
i iexe
Yogi
8,760 HOURS | 8
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 flex-
ible. You can easily adapt it to use whatever
tools you prefer. I always require the fol-
lowing:
➙ Pen and notebook
➙ Privacy
➙ Time
➙ Mind mapping software (optional)
If at any point in this guide you would rath-
er use a different set of tools—such as paper
and pen rather than mind mapping soft-
ware—then do it!
A NOTE ON MIND MAPPING
Mind mapping consists of starting with a
central idea in the middle of the page and
branching out ideas from there. For ex-
ample, the following two figures are of an
early pen and paper mind map I made when
outlining this guide and my review mind
map from last year, respectively.
For things like outlining, big picture think-
ing, and connecting ideas, mind mapping is
vastly superior to linear note taking, wheth-
er it’s with pen and paper or a software on
your computer.
Paper has the benefits of flexibility and
creativity, whereas software has the bene-
fits of any electronic tool—mobility, copy-
ing and pasting, printing, resizing, easy
scaling, etc.
Some mind mapping software options are:
➙ Mindmanager by Mindjet—expensive
but powerful. (This is my current pro-
gram of choice, though I have some
reservations.3)
➙ FreeMind—open source and free.
➙ MindMeister—free and online.
You must also be sure you will have enough
time. As mentioned in the introduction, I
3 Specifically, when I switched from Windows to OSX
I discovered that the Mac version of Mindmanager is not
as good as for Windows. Some key features I enjoyed
using were missing, and it is all-around more buggy. Still
powerful, but less good.
Figure 1: A sample paper & pen mind
map
Figure 2: A sample Mindmanager
mind map
8,760 HOURS | 9
stretch out this process over at least a few
days to get the most out of it.
THE TWELVE LIFE AREAS
One last thing before we get to the core
content of this guide.
Just as an airplane has wings, engines, win-
dows, controls, and landing gear, your life
has various components. Ignoring some of
them is like trying to fly without wings.
There are many ways to break down your
life into different “buckets.” Over time I
have collected and combined various meth-
ods and currently use twelve categories.4
V%$)-. & P)*#(.-
Your deeper, underlying, fundamental val-
ues and wants. Your philosophy of life. Your
sense of purpose, vision, and meaning.
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How you give value to the world, make a
difference, and have a positive impact.
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Your physical presence in the world. Where
you are in the world. Your living situation.
Your stuff. What you own and why. Your
material sufficiency. Your mobility.
4 I keep an up-to-date list of these categories at https://
alexvermeer.com/life-areas/.
M(&-" & F+&%&5-.
Your savings, investments, assets, and debt.
How your money is organization and man-
aged. Your inflows, budgets, and outflows.
C%*--* & W(*6
Your work, job, career, and business. Your
position, title, role, and responsibilities.
Your source of income.
H-%$'! & F+'&-..
Your eating habits, diet, exercise habits, and
activity levels. How resilient you are to sick-
ness. Your overall energy level. Your sleep-
ing patterns and quality. Your major health
issues and susceptibilities.
E3)5%'+(& & S6+$$ D-7-$(#0-&'
Your learning, education, and mental de-
velopment. Your talents and skills. Your
skill development, practicing, and training.
S(5+%$ L+,- & R-$%'+(&.!+#.
The intimate relationship(s) you have or
want to have. The quality of your relation-
ships. Your home life and relationships with
family members. Your friend circles and
social experiences. Your club, organization,
and community memberships.
E0('+(&. & W-$$-B-+&2
Your general feeling about life, optimism
or pessimism, positivity or negativity. Your
emotional intelligence. Your subjective
well-being, self-esteem, self-respect, and
self-compassion.
C!%*%5'-* & I3-&'+'"
Your identity and model of yourself. Your
strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices.
Your intelligence, integrity, honesty, cour-
age, compassion, honor, self-discipline, and
so on.
P*(3)5'+7+'" & O*2%&+:%'+(&
Your memorized solutions, daily routine,
schedule, effectiveness, organization, and
productivity. Your setup, systems, process-
es, tools, and techniques.
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Your hobbies, pastimes, and things you do
for fun and adventure. Your creativity and
its expression.
v v v
Yes, twelve is a lot of categories. Some of
you may prefer a different breakdown.5
Whatever categories you choose to use, the
5 For example, Chris Guillebeau's categories or the
ones Steve Pavlina uses in his book: Habits & Daily
Routine, Career & work, Money & finances, Health &
fitness, Mental development and education, Social life
& relationships, Home & family, Emotions, Character
& integrity, Life purpose & contribution, Spiritual
development.
8,760 HOURS | 10
rest of the guide should be easily adaptable to suit.
Note that certain aspects of your life will naturally overlap between the categories above.
For example, rock climbing has elements of Social (it is quite communal), Character (facing
fears), Fitness (makes you stronger), and Adventure (because it’s fun!).
For me, I climb because of how much fun it is, but I think of climbing as primarily great for
my mental and physical health, so I classify it under Health & Fitness. This overlap is perfectly
okay.
v v v
Now that we have the tools we can begin the actual review and planning.
8,760 HOURS | 11
II A SNAPSHOT OF YOUR LIFE
Now that we have the necessary tools in
our toolbox, it's time to build a detailed
picture of our life as it currently stands.
THE INITIAL OVERVIEW
Pull out that pen and paper. To start, you want to get the brain
thinking about this stuff by answering the following questions
about the past year:
1. What went well?
2. What did not go well?
3. Where did you try hard?
4. Where did you not try hard enough?
You also want to ask the following questions about right now:
➙ What is the current situation here?
➙ How do things stand right now?
➙ How would I summarize to a friend the status of this area?
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 on—they key here isn’t to find 10 things, but to get all the
“obvious” things out of your head, and quickly.
GETTING SPECIFIC: YOUR PRESENT
REALITY
Now it's time to dive deep. For each of the areas we will map out
a complete “status report” that includes an assessment of that area
and any relevant information or metrics.
For example, for Career & Work I assess my current career, my
standing within the company, my options, and my passion for
what I do.
To do this, I create a mind map with something like “Life Status –
End of 20xx” in the center with all of the life areas branching out,
and then add as much detail as possible about that area.
G-&-*%$ Q)-.'+(&. & P*(0#'.
➙ Detailed answers to each of the questions at the start of this
section.
➙ A short paragraph summarizing your thoughts about that
area of your life.
➙ Project status updates.
➙ Projects completed in the past year?
➙ Milestones from the past year?
➙ Important events from the past year?
➙ Accomplishments?
➙ Failures?
8,760 HOURS | 12
➙ Key life metrics such as income, qual-
ity of relationships, amount of dona-
tions, etc.?
➙ Your overall rating for this area
➙ Strengths in this area? Weaknesses?
For many of these, such as the overall area
rating and many of the key metrics, I like
using a seven-level Likert Scale from 1 (very
bad) to 7 (very good).6
H%00+&2 Q)-.'+(&.
Richard Hamming used to ask his co-work-
ers over lunch, “What are the important
problems of your field?” and then a while
later ask “What problems are you working
on?” and then a while later ask “Why aren’t
you working on the important problems?”
He soon found himself unwelcome at many
lunch tables!7
The general theme here is that we often
know what problems in our lives are more
important, yet we don’t work on them!
Here are some additional questions to ask
of yourself, both for each life area, and also
6 The full scale goes (1) very bad, (2) bad, (3) somewhat
bad, (4) neither bad nor good, (5) somewhat good, (6)
good, and (7) very good. If you want to keep things even
simpler, consider using the five-level scale: very bad, bad,
neutral, good, and very good.
7 Hamming mentions this is his talk “You and Your
Research.” H/t to CFAR for driving home how useful and
important these questions are.
your life as a whole:
➙ What is the most important problem
here?
➙ What is my biggest bottleneck?
➙ What is most holding me back from
achieving my full potential?
➙ What single thing, if successfully per-
formed, would have the biggest impact
here?
An example might be “solve my bad sleep
problems.” If you have reasons to think you
are not sleeping well—sleep apnea, bad mat-
tress, intermittent noise, etc.—it seems real-
ly important to tackle this head-on as quickly
as possible. Poor sleep has a significant ef-
fect on your quality of life and your ability
to do anything with your life.
A N('- %/()' J)32-0-&'.
It is important in this part of the process to
be objective and descriptive about the world,
without judgement. Don’t ignore internal
judgements when they pop up—they inevit-
ably will— but write them down separately
for the next step of this process. I.e., get it
out of your head, but then refocus on paint-
ing the descriptive picture of your life.
For example, ideas and future plans often
pop into my head while doing this. Same
with thoughts like “ugh, I really wish this
part was better.” I quickly jot these ideas
down on a separate piece of paper, for later
reference, and then continue on with the
current task.
v v v
As you brainstorm for each of the life areas,
review the descriptions outlined earlier.
Also, feel free to use the following questions
and metrics that I use in my review mind
map.
V%$)-. & P)*#(.-
➙ Do I have a sense of purpose and dir-
ection in life?
➙ What do I want out of life?
➙ How do I want the world to be differ-
ent?
➙ What is my philosophy of life?
➙ What are my fundamental values?
➙ What do I truly value?
C(&'*+/)'+(& & I0#%5'
➙ How am I giving value to the world?
How much value?
➙ How much money did I give away in
the past year (assuming it made sense
to do so)? Who did it go to? Did it
have the most possible impact?
➙ Am I taking responsibility for, and re-
8,760 HOURS | 13
ducing, my environmental impact on
the world?
➙ Am I making a difference?
➙ Am I contributing to important and
worthy causes that I care about?
➙ How much impact does my existence
have (environmentally, socially, cog-
nitively)?
L(5%'+(& & T%&2+/$-.
➙ Do I have material sufficiency?
➙ Where do I live? Where is my home?
Where in the world am I?
➙ What is my living situation like?
➙ Am I tied to one location? Am I read-
ily mobile (if desired)?
➙ How much stuff do I own? Do I have
too many things?
➙ Is my life cluttered?
M(&-" & F+&%&5-.
➙ Do I have savings? How much? Where
are they?
➙ Do I have an emergency fund? How
much? Where is it?
➙ What is the status of my assets and
investments?
➙ Do I know where my money goes?
➙ Do I budget? What is my budget?
➙ Am I aware of how I spend my
money?
➙ How do I want to be spending my
money?
➙ Are my finances organized?
➙ Do I have any (unwanted) debt?
C%*--* & W(*6
➙ How do I make my money?
➙ What do I do? What is my position?
What is my role? Where do I work?
➙ Am I so good they can't ignore me?
➙ Does my career give me mastery, con-
trol, and purpose?
➙ Am I engaged?
➙ Am I well-positioned and networked
within my industry?
➙ How stressful is my career/work?
H-%$'! & F+'&-..
➙ What do I typically eat? What is my
current diet?
➙ Do I regularly eat fast food or make
healthy home-cooked meals?
➙ Am I generally tired or alert?
➙ How often do I get sick?
➙ Do you exercise? What form? How
often?
➙ How much do I sleep on average? Am
I getting good quality sleep?
➙ How much do I weigh?
➙ What is my resting heart rate?
➙ Are there any health risks that run in
my family? Am I taking adequate steps
to address these?
Figure 3: My Health & Fitness review.
8,760 HOURS | 14
E3)5%'+(& & S6+$$ D-7-$(#0-&'
➙ What is my current education status?
What do I know?
➙ Am I spending time learning new
things and developing my mind?
➙ What are my talents and skills?
➙ How much have I read in the past
year?
➙ What talents and skills have I recently
developed, or plan to develop?
S(5+%$ L+,- & R-$%'+(&.!+#.
➙ How is my home life?
➙ How is my relationship with the
members of my immediate and ex-
tended family?
➙ Am I a good friend?
➙ How many core friends do I have?
How large are my social circles?
➙ Am I cared for, loved, and valued by
others?
➙ Are my partner and I aware of each
other’s needs and desires?
➙ What clubs, organizations, and com-
munities am I a member of?
➙ Do I have influence and status in my
social circles? In society?
E0('+(&. & W-$$-B-+&2
➙ How do I feel about my life?
➙ Am I enjoying life?
➙ Am I generally optimistic or pessim-
istic?
➙ Am I generally positive or negative?
➙ Am I easily aware of my current emo-
tional state?
➙ Am I quick to notice how my emo-
tions are influencing my thoughts, ac-
tions, and decisions?
➙ Do I have a regular mindfulness prac-
tice?
➙ Do I practice self-compassion?
C!%*%5'-* & I&'-2*+'"
➙ What identity do I have?
➙ Is my identity small? http://www.
paulgraham.com/identity.html
➙ What are my key strengths and weak-
nesses?
➙ What are my greatest virtues and
vices?
➙ How do I rate my compassion, integ-
rity, empathy, honor, self-discipline,
self-awareness, responsibility, cour-
age, focus, authenticity, confidence,
persistence, effectiveness, etc.?
8,760 HOURS | 15
P*(3)5'+7+'" & O*2%&+:%'+(&
➙ What productivity systems and tools do I use?
➙ Am I organized? What are my systems?
➙ What are my routines and rituals?
➙ Is there too much complexity in my life? Do I need to simplify?
➙ Am I doing any deep work?
➙ Am I busy due to a lack of priorities?
➙ Do I have a good workspace environment and setup?
A37-&')*- & C*-%'+7+'"
➙ Am I experiencing what I want to experience in life?
➙ What fun things have I done lately? In general?
➙ What creative things have I done lately? In general?
➙ What are my hobbies? What do I do for fun?
This whole process can easily take several hours. Once I’ve 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 | 16
III THE NEXT 8,760 HOURS
Now that you have a good
assessment of your present
state of existence it is time
to begin planning for the
future as a whole, and spe-
cifically the next year.
YOUR IDEAL FUTURE
The first thing to do is to know what ideals
you are aiming for.
I go through all areas of my life and re-
view 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 prob-
lems would I have solved?
I put all of this in a new mind map called
Future Vision and Goals.8
8 If you've already done this before, now is a good time
to review and update your “ideal future,” but there may be
no need to go through the entire exercise again.
Since I have already done this for sev-
eral 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.
Don’t fill up a mind map with things you
would like, that would be nice. For example
don’t put “Make $1,000,000,000 per year”—
unless that really is a goal you’re striving to
reach.
The point isn’t to think, “Well, I might as
well set my ideal as having 1,000 cars.”
Rather, seriously ask yourself what you
want your life to look like! When you’re
done you should have a good sense of what
the ideal you looks like. It should be full of
big lofty goals and coolness, as well as small
nudges and tweaks.
Some questions to help you think about
each life area:
➙ What do I want this to be like?
➙ What would be awesome?
➙ What would this look like if it was
perfect?
➙ What is something I’ve always wanted
to do here?
➙ What would my ideal life look like?
➙ Are there any specific projects to fin-
ish or goals to accomplish in this area?
➙ if I were to die in a year, what would
I do?
➙ if I were to die in 10 years, what
would I do?
➙ For the metrics in each area, what do I
ideally want them to be?
➙ If this area were improved, what
would that look like? I.e., make it vis-
ually concrete.
THE NEXT 8,760 HOURS
Now it’s time to start extracting what to do
over the next year from your highest ideals
and largest gaps.
What will you do with the next 8,760 hours
of your life? Not the next twenty years, not
the next five years, but this coming year.
8,760 HOURS | 17
Y-%*$" T!-0-
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” be-
cause 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 con-
stantly 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.
S-''+&2 % F(5).
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 im-
portant 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, don’t forget about the Hamming Questions mentioned ear-
lier, which can be very useful for identifying priorities and import-
ant focus areas.
YOUR MAJOR GOALS
Do you have any specific 1–2 year goals? Both a benefit and a flaw
from picturing your ideal life is that it tends to lack concreteness.
Goals tend to resemble new year’s resolutions in that they are
vague, non-specific, and hard to measure: “regularly exercise,” for
example.
Go through your mind map of your ideal life and extract some
specific important goals from it. List some key things that you
want to do in the next year. Can they be organized into projects?
Are they specific and measurable?
W!%' A/()' L(&2-*-T-*0 G(%$.?
At least for the present, I am done with specific long-term goals.
My life is in too much flux to realistically plan what I'll be doing in
next twenty years or even five years. My interests are too diverse to
know how I will want to be spending my time five years from now.
That said, I do still have some pretty specific medium-term goals
for the next year or two that I want to focus on.
If you have long-term goals that’s fine, but you may want to break
them up into smaller major goals that can be completed in 1–2
years.
Now that you have an idea of what you want to focus on next year,
what are your most important major goals? Try to limit it to 3–5
8,760 HOURS | 18
things. Remember, if you end up accom-
plishing those over the next year then you
can always add more, but do not bite off
more than you can chew.
Now create a new mind map called Current
Major Goals and add your most important
goals to it.
Some examples of my major goals from pre-
vious years:
Travel—Get off this continent and experi-
ence another culture; expand my know-
ledge 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 words—Get 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 route—Lead 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.]
Eliminate ALL financial debt—Student
loans, money owed parents, money owed
others; avoid all credit card debt. [Suc-
cess!]
Spend the time to really think about this!
What are the most important things you
want to do over the next year?
A N('- A/()' M-'%-S6+$$.
Meta-skills are those that help you achieve
all of your goals. For example, exercise is
overwhelmingly shown to improve many
areas of your health and overall life. This
better enables you to do everything else that
you want to do.
Likewise, taking the time to learn about
human motivation and procrastination has
more than doubled my productivity.
Every time I set my major goals for the year
I try to have at least one meta-skill goal. A
previous year it was to consciously work
on fighting my procrastination tendencies
(which resulted in my procrastination post-
er and a bunch of permanent improvements
to my overall productivity).
v v v
Now that we have a good awareness of our
present reality and our important major
goals, we are ready to set ourselves up for
success over the next 8,760 hours.
8,760 HOURS | 19
IV OPTIMIZING FOR SUCCESS
This may be the most important part of
the whole process outlined in this guide.
Reviewing our lives and outlining ma-
jor goals for the upcoming year is great,
but it is far from the most we can do.
The internet is full of life-hacking and optimization tips and tricks,
and I can’t possibly cover them all, so here are just a few of my
favorites.
THE PROCRASTINATION EQUATION
The procrastination equation is a way of illustrating how our mo-
tivations work. This equation accounts for every major finding on
procrastination
What this shows is that we are more motivated (less likely to pro-
crastinate) when either our expectancy of success or how much we
value a task are higher. Likewise, if we can decrease our impulsive-
ness (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-
able from any bookstore. For my own take on summarizing the
core ideas in this book, take a look at the free poster I made:
BUILDING ON THE MAJOR GOALS
For each of your major goals (and as many sub-goals or sub-pro-
jects as you see fit) address all of the following things.
“S)55-..,” D-'%+$., %&3 M-'*+5.
For each specific goal or project try to answer the following:
➙ What exactly is the project or goal?
➙ What will success look like? How will the world be different if
this succeeds?
➙ How can I measure it?
Motivation = Expectancy × Value
Impulsiveness × Delay