Planning a New Year

January 10, 2025

Welcome to a new year, and welcome to the excitement that comes with it. In this article we'll take a tour through several sides of the planning process: writing down ideas and goals, setting a direction, and things to keep in mind while you plan.
We'll pick up some ideas on execution and follow-up, and share some personal experiences along with others from books.
Some of these ideas may suit us, and we'll put them to work at this stage of planning. Others we may push back on and disagree with. What matters is that it turns out to be a year full of accomplishment.

Let's start with some important points to keep in mind..

The Slight Edge:

Someone decides one day to read ten pages of a book daily, which takes twenty minutes of his time. In a year, he'll have read ten books of four hundred pages each.

The same person decides, instead of reading, to scroll through social media for those same twenty minutes. In a year, he'll have burned more than 121 hours on nothing.

The time is trivial, twenty minutes. The effort is barely worth mentioning. Skipping it doesn't change how the day goes, and doing it doesn't visibly move the goal forward. If the reader skips his ten pages, he hasn't lost much, and if the scroller stops scrolling for a day, he hasn't missed much. But stay consistent with the small actions and the stunning results follow. This matches the hadith of Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her: the Prophet, peace be upon him, was asked which deeds are most beloved to Allah, and he said: the most consistent, even if small. This is what Jeff Olson wrote about in his book The Slight Edge. And what you'll see is that if both people we mentioned keep practicing their habit, the habit grows. If the reader keeps reading, you'll find that after two years he's finished thirty books, when he should have managed twenty at best. The truth is that the self grows used to a habit after a while, so practicing it feels lighter, and the person can stretch it further, reading twenty or thirty pages without strain. The same applies to every habit, and that's the crux of it: after a while you'll master the habit (or it will master you), practicing it becomes easy and familiar, and over time that pays you back enormously. Al-Busiri has a beautiful line on this:

The self is like a child: neglect it and it grows up loving to nurse, but wean it and it is weaned.

I couldn't decide whether to open this line with "unfortunately" or "the beautiful thing is", because the slight edge is actually working on us every single day the sun rises. If you're overweight and intend to improve your lifestyle, either you start and the slight change starts improving, or you don't start and the slight change keeps sliding downhill. Whether you're a smoker, an athlete, or a watcher of entertainment or educational content, every day you climb a step or slip one down. The difference is slight, barely worth mentioning in the moment, but the results pile up and show later. This is what's known as compound interest. Very nice. So if it's this simple (or if I've made it sound this simple), why don't people take it more seriously? Jeff Olson says there are three reasons:

It's easy to do, and just as easy not to do (ten minutes, a cigarette, a level, an episode; the amount is small).

The results aren't visible (after ten minutes of exercise you won't see the effect right away; after one cigarette you won't drop dead on the spot)

It doesn't seem to matter (ten minutes of exercise won't make a direct dent in ten or twenty extra kilos; a single cigarette won't do serious or noticeable damage to your lungs)

But here's the equation: time + repeated action = great results

From this we take two things. First, every decision you make has an effect, small or unnoticeable, negative or positive. So choose your decisions.

Second, goals are reached through consistency and steady work. On this point, Kevin Horsley says in his book Unlimited Memory: there has never been an inconsistent, uncommitted world champion.

We'll close this part with a Chinese proverb: do not fear growing slowly, fear only standing still.

Fail Only 51 Days a Year:

Now that we're done with consistency, this is a good topic to bring up. What happened the last time you committed to a diet, then broke it after two weeks? What happened after you committed to a daily reading portion of a book for ten days, then on days eleven and twelve got too busy to read? The short answer: collapse.

Simply put, the moment a person fails to keep a habit or a condition he set for himself, he quits on the spot. It's a pattern that repeats with the vast majority of people.

But it looks different from another angle. If, when you broke the diet, you went back to it the next day, kept it up for two more weeks, broke it again, and so on, what would the result be after two months? Impressive, without a doubt.

If you'd gone back to the book you abandoned after ten days and read it for another ten, you'd have finished it in about two months. Stop completely, and it sits locked in the drawer with a bookmark at the page where you surrendered.

We have 51 weeks a year. Let's fail once every week, without giving up.
Every start of a week is a chance to try again, to remember where we stopped and pick up from there.

Specialization:

In the early nineties, Anders Ericsson, a professor at the University of Florida, wrote in his paper on deliberate practice:

We deny that the differences between expert performers and ordinary adults are immutable. Rather, we attribute that gap in performance to the long stretches of effort aimed at improving performance in a specific domain.

Ask someone what they want to learn, and they'll immediately start listing tools, programs, skills, and fields. But we know our resources are limited (time, money, effort), and the problem is that we don't admit it. So you find someone putting a few hours into one field, then a few more into another, and he ends up knowing the surface of every craft without being able to practice any of them.

Specialization is one of the most important things that help a person excel and grow seasoned in a field. Sometimes you don't even have a choice, especially in fields that keep renewing and changing. On this, one of the sharpest minds of our era, Dr. Ian Goodfellow, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, said something excellent:

Not long ago I followed everything related to deep learning (a branch of artificial intelligence), especially while I was writing my book. But that's no longer possible. I only follow the topics clearly connected to my own research, to the point that I don't even know everything happening in GANs. (GANs are a class of AI algorithms he himself founded in 2014, and now he can't keep up with their developments, so he chose to pour his focus into what matters most to him.)

So two things need to be said,

It's essential to be solid in one specific field, and to have enough of the other disciplines that you can't be excused for ignorance of them, or enough to meet your needs.

Scattering yourself and hopping between fields generally wastes effort and bears no fruit.

Distraction

Clifford Nass says:

We split a group of people, based on their working habits, into multitaskers and non-multitaskers, and the difference was striking. The constant multitaskers can't filter out what's irrelevant and can't manage their working memory (meaning they forget a lot while working). They're chronically distracted, filling their minds until they overflow. When we talked with some of them, they said: "when we really want to focus, we shut everything off and focus." But sadly, they've built minds that are incapable of focusing. They're addicted to whatever is irrelevant in the moment. They can never work on a single task for long.

If you're someone who works on more than one task at a time, answering an email while writing a paper or reading something, if you're someone who opens social media in the middle of whatever you're doing, then no matter how well you plan, you're losing at least half your time, on top of the fact that your brain struggles to sink into the work and be fully present in it mentally.

Researcher Dr. David Meyer says:

The cost in extra time from switching between tasks depends on how easy or hard the tasks are. It can range from a time increase of about 25% or less for easy tasks, up to 100% or more for complex ones.

The solution? In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport says that to reach focus in your work and keep distraction away, do the following:

Set your work time and place (pick a suitable spot free of distractions, or with as few as possible, and set your working hours or minutes).

Decide how long you'll go (meaning, if you choose to work for two hours, how long will you work before taking a break and continuing? Your schedule could be 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest, for four sessions. This practical method is called the pomodoro technique).

Decide how you'll support your work (do you need coffee? Will fetching water or food interrupt you? Do you need paper for writing? Leave nothing around to distract you from your work)

Don't work alone (here he notes that working in groups increases creativity, though I think it depends on the nature of the work and the people. The work may not require creativity, and sitting with a group can be extremely distracting)

How Many Frogs in the Water?

Five frogs sat on a leaf on the water. One of them decided to jump in. How many are left on the leaf?

If you said four, you're wrong. If you said they all jumped, you're wrong. The answer is five. The frog decided to jump, but it didn't jump. Every time you intend to do something, you're still standing in place until you actually jump. Many goals stay on the goals list because their owner never jumped, and they migrate with him from year to year. And you are a person made of days: every day that passes takes a piece of you with it. So strive so that when the day of your death arrives, you won't regret anything you missed.

Double Your Failure Rate

Thomas Watson, one of the most famous businessmen of the first half of the last century, says:

Would you like me to give you the formula for success? It's quite simple: double your rate of failure. You keep thinking of failure as the enemy of success, but it isn't that at all. You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Do everything you can. Because, remember, wherever you find success, failure sits on the other side.

Maybe the idea is a bit wild and doesn't apply to everything, but there are many things we approach timidly for fear of failing. It's good to make peace with failure; it helps us pursue things with the greatest possible enthusiasm.
And if we don't reach the goal completely, we'll have gained what makes our next attempt more mature.

Taking an exam, starting a business, learning a skill, and things like that.

Addicted to Learning

Mark Twain has a great line on this:

The trouble with this world is not that people know too little. The trouble is that they know so many things that aren't useful.

How many people, if you looked at their plans, have a stack of courses and learning material they want to read or study. But don't forget: learning is the means, and doing is the end. As long as a person keeps circling inside the means, he won't reach the end (except as Allah wills), and if he does reach it, he'll have wasted a great deal of time and effort on things he could have done without.

Here we recall a very good piece of wisdom:
Life is doing, if you aren’t doing you are dying

It should be said that this point isn't a case against learning; it's a call for balance. Here's a great quote from The Slight Edge:

Knowledge without practice is waste, and practice without knowledge is danger.

Practice can also drive learning. Instead of chasing a course or a certificate, a person sets out to build a specific project, and whenever he notices a gap in his knowledge, he learns what fills it and carries on with the project. He ends up with the project plus the hands-on knowledge, which may be all he ever needed.

Learn How to Learn

You may be someone who finds learning hard and struggles with it. On this front there's plenty of practical material, in video and in writing, that solves the problem, including:

The course Learning how to learn
The book A mind for numbers

Both of the above are by Barbara Oakley and cover roughly the same ideas, which revolve around two axes: first, effective learning methods and how to apply them; second, improving your lifestyle and how that connects to better learning.

The book Unlimited Memory

Kevin Horsley, the author, has an astonishing gift for memorization that he developed from childhood. He spent nearly twenty years learning and refining memory techniques, and in this book he covers many of the techniques and methods that helped him earn the title International Grandmaster of Memory

The book The first 20 hours

The author, Josh Kaufman, has a theory that you can learn any skill well enough to practice it in just twenty hours, if you stick to the points the book lays out.

These are some useful sources on learning methods, tested by their authors and shaped into a practical form ready to apply. They may be worth using, or at least worth a look. And you don't have to apply everything you read or hear; maybe adapt things to your needs, or take just the parts that fill your gaps.

Persistence

The difficult takes time to achieve. The impossible takes a little longer than the difficult.

Don't expect to reach the heights through comfort. If that's how it worked, you'd find everyone up there. But once you put in the effort and keep going, with Allah's help every difficult or impossible thing bends for you. Steve Martin has a nice line on this: perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

There are plenty of sayings about perseverance being the most important ingredient of success, including one attributed to Einstein: genius is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent hard work.

And Coleman Cox says: I am a great believer in luck. The harder you work, the more of it you seem to get.

One of the finest things said on this is al-Mutanabbi's line:

Were it not for hardship, all people would be masters: generosity impoverishes, and boldness gets men killed.

In this part we'll go over some points worth keeping in mind while building the plan

Plan for the Shortest Possible Period

For three reasons given in Brian Moran's book The 12 Week Year:

Fewer mistakes: the longer a plan runs, the more it drifts and veers off course. You'll often find that the goals at year's end look nothing like the ones from the start of the year, which is natural, since we don't know what we're stepping into or how things will turn out this year.
It saves time: so time isn't lost on planning, calculating, adjusting, and researching.
It gives focus: the shorter the period, the better the goal fits the time, with a suitable milestone that makes a good leap forward. The longer the period, the more planning there is, and possibly more goals and more scattering.

So the first rule is planning for the shortest period. To make it concrete, we set goals for three months, a stretch short enough that you can usually manage it well and keep your focus on your goal.
Then you plan a week or two at a time to bring you closer to the goal

The Areas That Matter

A person sometimes drifts away from important things in his life, busy with the things he planned for. And while those are an important part of life, there are other areas no less important. Among them:

The religious side: the truly sharp person doesn't just maintain this side, he puts it above all other priorities, for two reasons
- First, it's the purpose we're here for: "And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me." (Surah Adh-Dhariyat). At the moment of leaving this world, the only thing that will occupy your mind is what relates to this purpose.
- Second, after we depart, we'll be held to account for it: "Did you think that We created you in vain, and that you would not be returned to Us?" (Surah Al-Mu'minun)
The social side: your friends, your relatives, and the people you're connected to. It's good to nourish these relationships.
The family side: mother and father, siblings, wife and children. They're your support in hardship and your joy in ease. You're rewarded for keeping those ties, and you sin by cutting them.
The financial side: what you earn, what you spend it on, how to grow the earnings and improve the spending. I say improve here because I don't mean cutting expenses; I mean directing them toward what brings you more, or finding alternatives of the same quality at a lower price, or dropping what you can do without.
The health side: neglect it, and one day you may not be able to carry out your plans.
The community side: every day your knowledge or your influence grows, the community gains a claim on you. You're rewarded for serving it, Allah willing, and it may even become a source of income.

These areas differ from person to person. Some people cover them within their daily or weekly habits, so while planning they don't need to add them to the plan as long as they keep them up. Others don't care about some of these areas, so there's no point in having them in the plan.

But for whoever wants to work these areas into the plan, here are some ideas

The religious side: keeping the obligatory prayers, especially Fajr; catching the opening takbir; memorizing a portion of the Quran; keeping the regular Sunnah prayers, Witr and Duha.
The social side: a weekly visit to the friends' gathering, a monthly meetup scheduled with a friend, visiting a relative weekly.
The family side: visiting the family home four days a week, going on an outing once a month, family challenges like memorizing Quran, reading a book, or building a healthy habit.
The financial side: setting aside a fixed amount monthly, diversifying investments every three months (stocks, sukuk, and funds), building a side source of income.
The health side: four workout sessions a week, walking half an hour after Maghrib, one open meal a week.
The community side: recording a video explaining a topic monthly, writing an article on a topic weekly, summarizing a book every two weeks, clearing time once a week to answer questions or help someone.

Month, Week, Day

To build a plan, we split the year into four quarters, three months each. We care only about the quarter we're in, then

We set this quarter's goals (the book The One Thing recommends no more than three goals, since more leads to scattering)
We split the stages of the goal across the three months roughly (for example, reading a book: the first four chapters in month one, the next four in month two, and the last four in the final month)
We plan the current month only (I'll start chapter one in week one, chapter two in week two, and so on), and month planning happens at the start of each month
We plan the week (at the start of each week, Saturday or Friday, or whenever your week begins, but make it a fixed day. Read chapter one at a rate of five pages a day, from eight in the morning until eight thirty)

And with that, you've built a schedule for reaching your goals

When

It's not enough to define what you're going to do; you also need to define when you're going to do it. Unexpectedly, this showed up in the results of a study run on a group of people split into three groups, each asked to do a set of physical exercises for two weeks. The first group was motivated by an explanation of the importance of the exercises and their health benefits (the motivated group). The second group received the same motivation as the first, plus a requirement to set a time they'd commit to exercising (the scheduled group). The third group received no motivation and wasn't asked to commit to a time (the neglected group).

After two weeks, the results came out as follows:

38 percent of the neglected group stuck to the exercise

35 percent of the motivated group stuck to the exercise

93 percent of the scheduled group stuck to the exercise

Which shows the effect that assigning a time to the work has on actually sticking to it.

At the very least, it creates what's called productive tension, that uncomfortable feeling of knowing there's something you should be doing that you're not doing right now.

A Side Note

If you didn't stick to the plan, that doesn't mean the plan failed; it means you failed to follow it. After all, 60 percent of plans fail at execution, not at planning, and here's a great quote from The Slight Edge:
It's not about how you plan your work, it's about how you work your plan.
Set aside a day called the "backup day". Its purpose: if on some day you don't manage to get things done, for whatever reason, you can get back on plan through this day, or use it to get ahead of the plan and accomplish even more.
What takes a day, give it two days. What you think you can finish in an hour, give it two. Think you can read two chapters of a book a day? Put one chapter a day in the plan, and read two. The plan only asks you for one. Over time, raise the amount.

Reviewing Your Performance

One of the most important parts of the work is reviewing performance. By that we mean listing the things that need to get done during the week, then at the end of the week giving each goal a number. There can also be a grade for the week (1 to 5, or excellent, good, fair, poor)

The book The 4 discipline execution, which covers the things that help a person stay disciplined and committed, says in its fourth point that one of the biggest boosters of commitment is meeting regularly to discuss what got done and what still needs doing. Deep Work mentions the same point, but notes that a group isn't always available, and suggests an alternative: hold a review at the end of each week. What did I get done? How much distance is left to the goal? Did I beat expectations this week? And so on.

In the same vein, many popular fitness programs are built on a person rating his own performance, then pushing to beat it the following week.

So your review sheet might have, for example

Read four chapters of the book: /4
Exercise five days a week: /5

At the bottom of each review sheet, leave a small section for your notes, like "finished such-and-such book" or "lost this much weight this week". It's motivating to look back at previous weeks and see your progress.

Planning Blocks

Even though we touched on this earlier in Month, Week, Day, this time it comes from Deep Work in general terms. He says the plan divides into blocks

The strategy block: the part of the plan where you commit to working at maximum focus, without interruption (we covered how to reach focus in the distraction section)
The backup block: an unscheduled part of the plan you fall back on if things don't go the way they should.
The stop block: the part of the plan where you commit to stopping work and enjoying the break.

What do we mean by a block?
We mean hours. So you might have, say, an hour of total focus on the work, then a backup half hour to use if you didn't make the progress you wanted, then a half hour where you stop working and busy yourself with something else, and then you run the loop again. That's one example and one shape of dividing time into blocks.

Desire Alone Isn't Enough

It happens a lot: you sit with a person or a group, or attend a conference or a competition or some other event, and you walk out fired up by what you heard or saw. You might even start a project or launch into a plan, keep it up for a short while, then stop, and later discover it was all the enthusiasm effect. That's why The 12 week year lays down rules for choosing and executing a goal.

A burning desire to achieve it. There's a reason you're going after it.
There have to be stages you walk through toward the goal, so you can tell how much is done and how much remains.
Count the costs and benefits: estimate roughly what achieving this goal will cost in material and mental effort, then ask yourself, is it really worth it?
After that, work according to what you planned, not according to how you feel. Discipline is what shapes our lives.

Tell Me How You Think and I'll Tell You Who You Are

Studies have shown that the human brain contains something called the amygdala, which pushes a person to avoid dangerous and unclear things. It's useful in general, but the problem is that when a person starts planning things and going after them, naturally unsure of the outcome, this part of the brain starts discouraging him, holding him back from pushing forward, persisting, or executing his plan. That's the negative side. The beautiful thing about the brain is that it has another part called the prefrontal cortex that moves in the opposite direction to keep the balance. When a person thinks about the future, progress, and achievement, this part starts firing with increasing electrical pulses.

The more exciting part of this: scientists used to think the brain was fixed, but over time they discovered that parts of the brain grow with use. The neural connections multiply, and the used part of the brain grows in size.

This capacity of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity. The downside is that if you aren't thinking about progress, achievement, and change, you're naturally feeding the amygdala. The good news is that you can grow the other part (the prefrontal cortex) just by thinking about progress and achievement. That's why it's a good idea to picture what the accomplishment will look like, and the details of the goal once it's reached.

And now that you have a brain scientifically proven to be changeable, isn't this the right time to start changing, and to develop your abilities and your brain's abilities? And presumably, if you develop a brain that welcomes goals others see as impossible, you'll become, Allah willing, a person of tremendous impact.

Closing

Benjamin Franklin says: take care of the minutes, and the years will take care of themselves.

That was a collection of ideas, experiences, and things that may help a person set off planning this year for more accomplishment. Whether you're reading this article at the beginning, middle, or end of the year, rest assured that goals don't know what time it is, so the right time to start is now.

Take from these points whatever suits you and helps you on your way. Try, change, improve. Every attempt is experience, and every experience builds a more mature attempt, and so the cycle of attempts turns, and the expertise grows with it.

I ask Allah to make your life full of accomplishment

References