Are you ready to dedicate a day to building your Life Plan? That’s a major commitment, and to help you make the most of that time, we’ve created this Life Planner’s Quick Guide to refresh you on all the major points and maintain positive momentum as you go.
Helpful Pointers
Block the day on your calendar and let everyone important—wife, boss, whoever—know that you’re going to be out of pocket. Choose a suitable location, take everything you need to write and stay focused, and determine to go offline.
As you get started, remember to stay in a positive frame of mind. You’re charting a course to your envisioned future. This is a time to be grateful, eager, and open. Trust the process and listen to your heart. There are no right or wrong answers. All you need to do is think, imagine, and write about something you care deeply about: your life.
The rest is as simple as following these five clearly marked steps.
Step 1: Write Your Eulogy
The first step in life planning is to consider where you want to end up. Nobody plans a trip without choosing a destination. For us that means writing your own eulogy. What will your legacy be? What will your life mean to those closest to you? What will they remember about you? How will your life have impacted theirs?
It might feel daunting, but this first step is critical. It will not only get your head in the game but also your heart. One easy way to begin is to list all the people you want to remember you: spouse, family members, friends, teammates, and so on. Then list how you want to be remembered by each of them: loyal, brave, kind, always eager to help—however you most desire to be remembered.
Once you have those elements, you can shape them into your eulogy. To see how others have done it, you can jump ahead to the Life Plan examples in the next section. The key is to write it as if your funeral is being held today, not some date down the road. By writing as if your eulogy was being delivered right now, you can begin thinking of what it will take to make those imagined memories real.
Step 2: Establish Your Life Accounts
Since you’ve written your eulogy, you already have a start on this. How and by whom you want to be remembered should begin to inform what Life Accounts you establish.
Here are some broad categories to work with: Spiritual, Marital, Parental, Social, Financial, and Personal. You can see a more thorough list and how the accounts might take shape on pages 72–76. You can have as few as five and as many as twelve. Most people end up with about nine. A starter list might look like this:
You should personalize and customize your list so it works well for you.
Step 3: Determine the Condition of Your Accounts
Think of your Life Accounts as bank accounts. What’s the balance in each? Do you have what you need in each, or are you running low? Are you, for instance, overinvested in work and underfunding family? That’s a typical problem, and this step is designed to identify those issues across all your accounts.
Step 4: Prioritize Your Life Accounts
We all have priorities. But we’re not always clear on what they are, right? It’s critical that we decide what accounts matter most so we can let them determine our actions. Where does work really fit in the scheme of things, your family, your friends, your community, your church? When we’re not clear on what matters most, it’s easy to give our attention to what simply demands the most.
And here’s a tip. We explain this on pages 81–85, but it can be really helpful to put you and your self-care near the top. It’s too easy to neglect what makes everything else possible.
Step 5: Fill Out Each Account
The most effective way to work with your Life Accounts is to create an Action Plan for each one. These five sections will help you get from where you are right now to where you want to be in each of these key areas of your life:
On this last point, be SMART—make sure you’re not only specific, but that your commitments are also measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. You want to dial these in so tight you can drop them onto your calendar or tomorrow’s to-do list.
Remember, thousands of people have already created their Life Plans and are reaping the rewards. You can too. Check the next section for a few helpful examples.