Why and how to make a Life Plan
Intentionality starts at a higher horizon.
What are you looking forward to doing today? Every morning, I ask myself this question in my journal. I don’t always have an answer. Some days are just full of stuff that needs to be done, and the only thing I look forward to is getting it done. There’s nothing really inspiring about days like this, and that’s OK because we all have some days like this. But if you start to find that most days are like this, it’s time to take a step back and think.
I recently went into some depth here about finding myself seemingly stuck in a loop where every day was like this, just grinding to get things done, and I had lost all sense of meaning or direction. The way I broke out of this loop was to clarify my purpose and principles so I wasn’t just “getting things done” but getting the right things done. In this post I wanted to share more of the specifics of what I did, so that you can try something like this too.
Horizon 5 and why it’s important
In Getting Things Done (GTD) language, the level of altitude at which we view our lives and work from the standpoint of overarching purpose and principles is called Horizon 5. It’s the topmost of the horizons of focus, an often-neglected part of GTD practice. David Allen describes Horizon 5 this way:
What is the work you are here to do on the planet, with your life? This is the ultimate bigger picture discussion. Is this the job you want? Is this the lifestyle you want? Are you operating within the context of your real values, etc.? [...] No matter how organized you may get, if you are not spending enough time with your family, your health, your spiritual life, etc., you will still have “incompletes” to deal with, make decisions about, and have projects and actions about, to get completely clear.
I don’t think there’s a day that goes by that we’re not asking ourselves these questions. Clarity on them – not necessarily answers, but even just a good-faith pursuit – gives a basis for how to say “yes” or “no” to requests and options that we’re constantly faced with. A lack of clarity means you’re at the mercy of other people and the “latest and loudest”.
Many faculty today find themselves in the latter sentence — overworked and feeling helpless and trapped. Not all faculty in these situations are there because they lack clarity on their purpose and principles, as if escaping the situation were as simple as knowing your values and making better choices. However: I think nearly all faculty who haven’t thought carefully about their purpose and principles, end up in those situations.
I know, because I was one of those faculty once. I had only a vague idea of why I was doing what I was doing as a faculty member, so I had no systematic way of making decisions about what to say “yes” or “no” to. I ended up living my life each day simply doing stuff on other people’s to-do lists. It’s no way to live, and one of the reasons I write this Substack is to help others avoid that situation. If you are a faculty member feeling trapped in a terrible work situation like this: I don’t judge you or offer oversimplified lifehacks. I just invite you to keep reading and see if what I describe below could be remotely helpful, which I hope it is.
Life Plans
There are lots of ways to think about Horizon 5. The approach I’ve found useful for myself is to make something called a Life Plan. I first learned about this from former publishing CEO Michael Hyatt and I’ve modified his approach to match my own way of thinking. Creating a Life Plan involves going deep on three questions.
What are your values?
What are your roles?
What are your domains?
I’m going to go into detail on each of these questions. But I should be clear, unlike a weekly review that takes maybe 90 minutes maximum, this is not a quick process. It took me two separate half-day retreats, getting away from my house and the office and clearing my calendar to focus solely on this process before it came together. It takes time, but without a doubt the time I spent on this has more than paid for itself, because I can now make good decisions quickly and I’m not wasting time on so many meaningless tasks.
What are your values?
Your values are your core, non-negotiable ideals that define who you are and who you want to be. We all have values, but few people take the time and effort to codify them precisely and review them regularly.
When crafting a Life Plan, you write down, in simple and explicit terms, what it is that animates and motivates you to live and work. Write these down in a document that you can reference and tweak later. What worked for me, and what I recommend to others, is:
Keep your list of values short, preferably no more than 3-4 big ideas.
State each in a memorable way, so when faced with a decision, you can recall these easily.
Flesh each value out with some specific descriptions of what the value looks like when lived out.
I wrote in some detail about my own process of coming up with core values in this post. I began by brainstorming concepts that inspired me and described the kind of person I hope to be. The initial list was too long to be of practical use – I couldn’t remember them all when I needed them. What helped me simplify was realizing that “values” are similar to the idea of virtues, a somewhat old fashioned term referring to positive moral, social, or intellectual traits. People have written about virtues for centuries. After taking a couple of hours to read some of that past wisdom, I came up with four fundamental values: Growth, Humanity, Temperance, and Transcendence.
It’s only four things, and they’re easy to remember. In the document where these are written, there’s another list below each that describes it. For example, Temperance looks like this:
I view each decision I make as a vote for the kind of person I want to become, and choose accordingly.
I am disciplined, focused, and self-controlled.
I do not engage in self-destructive behaviors such as defeatism, pessimism, laziness, or overindulgence in food or drink.
Instead, I enthusiastically engage in behaviors that help others and improve my capacity for good: Optimism, moderation in food and drink, consistent physical exercise, and focused attention to learning.
I believe that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and seek to simplify all areas of life and work as much as possible.
When I wrote these, I was surprised to find I was profoundly emotionally moved. The resonance was strong, because each description is an envisioned future that I greatly desire, even if right now I might be falling short. When you are clear on what you value, or at least what you hope that you value, it becomes a magnetic north by which you can align your compass.
What are your roles?
You also have roles that you play in life and at work. These are not the same as your values, and hopefully not opposed, but just another dimension we use to plot our courses. After writing out my values, I wrote out the main roles I have in life. (You could conceivably do roles first, then values, or both simultaneously.) Mine are: father, husband, colleague, teacher, writer, speaker/facilitator, and musician. There are not the only roles I play in life, just the main ones that occupy most of who I am.
Next to each role, I wrote a short paragraph that starts with “I exist in this role to…” followed by a description of what I intend to do in that role, and then with a description of how I intend to carry that out. For example here’s the description for “teacher”:
I am a teacher. I exist in this role to help my students grow intellectually and become lifelong learners. I do this by having enthusiasm for the subjects I teach; by having a strong knowledge of effective practices for learning and instruction; by setting up a class environment that enables students to have significant encounters with important concepts; and paying attention to details that make my classes memorable and personal.
I said that your roles are not the same as your values. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. For example, suppose a faculty member writes that “being a great teacher” is one of their basic values. The problem is that this is two different things: Being a teacher, and being great at teaching. The first is a role – a job. The second is a value — maybe more than one, for example this could mean the pursuit of knowledge, caring for others, or being committed to excellence, or all of these.
If we conflate values with roles, we might start to believe the only way to pursue our values is through that specific role, and we are less free to pursue different roles because we think we’re compromising our values. A faculty member in the above situation, for example, might identify their teaching position with their underlying values and think, I have to stick with my job for the sake of my students even if it ruins my mental and physical health. Institutions will almost always take advantage: Heavier teaching loads, larger class sizes, increasing requests for unpaid labor, and more, while expecting the faculty member to just say “yes” because if you say “no”, you’re not committed to students and not serious about your supposed values.
You can’t always fight back against such exploitation. What you can do is realize that you are more than just your job, or even your current professional role. The professor in the above situation can realize, I can, and do care for other human beings and pursue knowledge in a lot of different ways, not just in a faculty position – and begin to explore other options without having to feel like they are walking away from their basic values. That professor may be limited in how they can act on what they discover, but they have gained some clarity on the relationship between their fundamental calling as a human being and the job they are currently in. And with clarity comes some hope.
What are your domains?
The last big category of a life plan are the domains of life, which is a third axis orthogonal to both values and roles. These are areas of your life experience that are significant to you. Mine are: Body, Mind, Spirit, Family, Community, Money, Work, and Hobbies. Together, these cut across different roles and embody different combinations of values.
Next to each domain I describe an envisioned future in that domain. For example, here’s the list for “Mind”:
I consistently engage in both formal and informal learning activities like courses and structured learning experiences.
I read daily: Books, web articles, and research papers; fiction and nonfiction; fun stuff and difficult stuff.
My mind is a place of order and reasoned rationality.
My mind is energetic with "creative juices" consistently flowing.
My attention is focused on the things I can immediately change or impact; and I disinvest from everything else.
If you are doing this exercise, I recommend using the eight domains above, since I think they are common to most people’s experiences, with whatever small changes you want to make. Focus on the envisioned future of each. And don’t be shy about those futures! You may not be in a place today where you are close to that future, and that’s OK. What you want to do here is dream a little, and imagine yourself further along in life.
What to do with a Life Plan
These three questions and their answers, again, constitute my Life Plan, which lives in a document in my notes program. I do three main things with this Life Plan.
First, the first thing I do in my periodic reviews is reread the Life Plan. This was the key change I needed to resolve my issues last year with feeling adrift and without purpose. Very simply, I was not in regular contact with the viewpoint at the highest elevation. I’ve found that reviewing the Life Plan gives me the perspective I need to think about what’s coming next year, next quarter, next month, next week and how to prioritize.
Second, and related, I use the Life Plan — or at least my list of values — as a filter for decision making. For example, back in the summer, I was invited to speak at a university in the Middle East, in August just before the semester started. There were significant pros and cons: On the one hand it was an amazing opportunity to travel and work with a university in a new part of the world for me. On the other, it was a big investment in time and energy, just as I was trying to get my classes launched, and given the geopolitical status of that region there was a nonzero risk to my personal safety. To decide what to do, I looked at what I had written under the fundamental value of Growth: I move toward intelligent risks and adventurous opportunities, not away from them. I couldn’t get this out of my head! So I said “yes”, had an amazing journey, and am glad I did it instead of saying I was too busy, or being too preoccupied with safety.
Third, I maintain the Life Plan. It is not a static document but one that will grow and change as I do. I don’t think my core values and domains will ever change that much, but I can and often do add to or tweak the descriptions of what they look like, based on life experiences. And certainly my roles in life will change over time; I won’t be a teacher forever, for example, and when my kids start having their own kids then “Father” will change to “Father/Grandfather” or something like that. Every quarterly review is an opportunity to update that document if I need to.
Now you do it
I always give “homework” in these posts that I have no expectation of people doing — it’s good for you if you do it, but OK if you don’t. This time I feel differently: I think it is critically important for every professional in higher education to work on the following “assignment”:
Step 0: Schedule a full-day or two half-day retreats with yourself, perhaps during the upcoming holidays, to fully focus on getting clear at Horizon 5. Get out of the house and the office; bring only a pen and a notebook, a computer or tablet if you must.
Step 1: Get clear on your values. Brainstorm ideas that resonate with you; do outside reading and research on what others have said; keep the top 3-5 ideas that animate you the most and flesh them out as I described.
Step 2: Get clear on your roles. Again write these down, keep the ones that make up most of your life, and describe to yourself what you hope to accomplish in those roles and how you plan to accomplish it.
Step 3: Get clear on your domains. Using the ones I listed as a start, write out your own list and describe your envisioned future — boldly and optimistically, while also realistically — in each.
Step 4: Compile all this into a document that you can keep, re-read, and change over time as you change.
Etc.
Is it too early for Christmas music? I don’t know, but here’s one of the great underrated Christmas tunes of all time. The bassist here laying down this amazing groove is the great Tracy Wormworth who went on to work with Sting, the B-52s, and Cyndi Lauper.