Your year, on one page

This ndoc is a two-part practice: once a year you sit down and decide what the next twelve months are for, and then, every month or quarter, you come back and check whether it's happening. The stage does the remembering — open it and the last-year review, the goals, and every check-in live there. This page explains why it asks what it asks, so the prompts feel like help rather than paperwork.

Look back before you look ahead

Why the review comes before the goals

The instinct at New Year is to skip the past and start listing ambitions. Resist it for twenty minutes.

Goals don't fail in January; they fail for reasons that were already visible last year. The project that quietly ate your evenings. The habit that stuck without any willpower. The commitment you kept saying yes to out of politeness. If you don't write those down, you will walk into the new year carrying all of them and wonder by March why nothing moved.

The review also tells you where your energy actually comes from, which is the best raw material for goal-setting. A goal built on something that already pulled you forward has a real chance. A goal built purely on duty has a deadline-shaped chance, and the deadline is usually two weeks in.

Three prompts are enough: what worked, what drained you, and one sentence of advice to next-year-you. The last one isn't decoration. The stage shows it to you at every check-in, which turns experience into something you can actually use, instead of a vague feeling you had in December.

Set the year

Specific beats inspiring

The most reliable finding in three decades of goal research is that specific, challenging goals produce higher performance than vague or easy ones — including "do my best" goals, which sound motivating and mostly aren't 1. "Get in better shape" gives your future self nothing to decide about. "Four short sessions a week, walked or run, through October" tells you exactly what today's choice is.

So each goal here asks for two things: what you want, and how you'll know it's happening — a number, a date, or something you could show another person. If you can't name a way to know, that's a wish, not a goal. Wishes are fine to have; they just don't steer anything.

There's a caveat worth honouring: a metric is a proxy, not the point. Pick a measure you'd be content to have fully optimised. If the number you chose could be satisfied in a way that leaves you hollow, choose a different number.

Fewer, sharper

Three to five goals. More than that and you have a list, and lists are how people quietly spread themselves thin. Attention is finite and goals compete for it, so the real skill of annual planning is deciding what not to pursue 1.

A useful test: at the end of this year, if only two of these went well, would the year still have been yours? If not, the two are your real goals and the rest are supporting detail — write them as that, or let them go. Dropping a commitment is not a failure of ambition; it's how you make room for the ambition you actually care about.

The if–then plan

This is the part most plans skip, and it's the one that predicts whether anything happens.

Deciding what you want is the intention. An implementation intention is the small extra line that says when and where you'll act: "When it's Monday morning and I've had my coffee, then I put on my shoes and go out." Across a meta-analysis of some 94 study samples, these plain when-and-where plans produced a medium-to-large boost to whether people followed through 2. They work because they hand the decision to the situation: you don't negotiate with yourself at 7am, you just recognise it's Monday morning.

Then add the second half. "If the weather turns awful, then I do twenty minutes indoors instead." Naming the obstacle in advance, alongside the plan for it, is what makes the whole thing durable — pairing a clear-eyed view of what stands between you and the goal with a specific response is more effective than visualising the win alone, and it holds up across health, study, and work goals 3.

So: what usually gets in the way? What will you do instead? One line each. That's the whole technique, and it's cheap enough to use on every goal.

Track it

Monthly check-in, quarterly reset

Goals without feedback mostly don't work. Knowing how you're doing is what converts a goal into effort and adjustment; a target with no reading on it just sits there 1. That reading doesn't have to be elaborate — this stage asks for three minutes: one number out of five, and one line about what moved.

Monthly for the check-in, because a quarter is long enough for a year to drift unremarked. Quarterly for a proper reset, because a month is too short to judge anything real. Aim the monthly check at the behaviour — did the plan run? — rather than at your worth as a person.

Two rules for the number, because the tracking only helps if it's honest:

When a goal stalls

A low number isn't a verdict on you. People who treat a setback with some kindness — the way they'd talk to a friend — end up more willing to try again and more likely to actually repair what went wrong; the harsh inner critic reliably produces less effort, not more 4. The shame spiral costs you the next three months; the honest question costs you ten minutes.

So at a stalled goal, ask only: what got in the way, and what's the smallest version of this that could still happen this month? A goal scaled down and done beats one held heroically and abandoned in February.

And it's allowed to end

Some goals should be dropped — the one you only keep because it was written down in December. Others need to be replaced, because the year changed and the goal didn't notice. Removing a goal here costs nothing and takes one click. The point was never to obey a list you made when the light looked different.