With the new year fast approaching, it’s time to start thinking about what you want to get out of this time. To help you in putting all of your thoughts and ideas together, printing out a calendar that you can visually see all year long can be incredibly helpful. However, if you don’t have your calendar filled in as you want it, the time in your year can quickly start to spiral out of control.
To help make sure that this doesn’t happen to you, here are three tips for planning out your calendar for the next year.
Plan Out Meaningful Time With Family and Friends
While there are going to be things on your calendar that won’t end up moving throughout the year, like the time you spend at work, the things that are more flexible are the areas of your calendar that you should focus on now at the beginning of a new year.
One category of time that you’ll want to be sure that you include in your calendar this new year is meaningful time with friends and family. While you might think that you can easily just throw plans together or fit people in where you have time, if you wait to plan until the last minute, you might find that plans get canceled more often or that things fail to get planned entirely. But by taking the time now to plan, at least a few months in advance, you can ensure that you’re able to portion out time for the people who mean the most to you.
Be Sure To Include Downtime For Yourself
In addition to planning out time that you can spend with your friends and family, it’s also vital that you don’t neglect to schedule in some downtime for yourself.
Too often people will remember to calendar all of their other obligations except for the ones that could actually be refreshing and recharging for them. So to make sure that this coming year is full of self-care and not overscheduling yourself, make sure you schedule in downtime that you can take advantage of on a very regular basis.
Include Your Goals Into Your Calendar
As you seek to start filling out your calendar for the next year, something that you should always keep in mind are the goals that you’re wanting to accomplish for the coming year.
Depending on what your goals are and how long you envision it taking you to accomplish those goals, you can create reminders or deadlines on your calendar for when you’ll have wanted to complete a step that gets you closer to your goal. This way, you can better ensure that you’re able to stay on track with everything.
If you’re going to be sitting down to plan out portions of your calendar for the coming year, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you do this effectively.