Experiments

Life planning templateA decade is made of years
you can actually name.

Long-range planning has a bad reputation because it is usually done at the wrong resolution. A ten-year plan written as a list of specific achievements is fantasy — you do not know who you will be — while a ten-year plan written as a direction is one of the few things that reliably changes what somebody does with a Tuesday.

Free, no sign-up. Saves in your browser, downloads as a PDF or a spreadsheet, and imports into EvyOS in one click.

The direction

Written once, revisited yearly. Deliberately not a list of achievements.

By area, across the horizons

Each row narrows left to right. If the last column does not lead to the second, something is wrong.

Ten yearsThree yearsThis yearThis quarter
Work
Money
Health
Relationships
Home
Learning
Contribution

What that makes this quarter

Pulled from the last column. This is the only part with dates on it.

GoalHow you will knowByProgress
0%
0%
0%
0%

The honest check

Everything you type is saved in this browser only. Fill in a row or two and the download and import options will have something to work with.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Ten years, as a direction

Not achievements. The kind of work, the kind of place, the kind of days.

2
Three years, as a picture

Specific enough that you would recognise it if you walked into it.

3
Check the chain

Read the quarter column and ask whether it points at the ten-year one. Usually it does not, and that is the finding.

So this template steps down through four horizons. Ten years is a direction and a kind of life. Three years is a picture concrete enough to recognise. One year holds actual goals. The quarter holds the work. Each row narrows, and the test of the whole document is whether the quarter column plausibly leads to the ten-year one.

Do it in one sitting, top to bottom, then revisit the bottom two rows quarterly and the top two annually.

✦ The limit

A plan is not a record.

This page holds what you intend. It cannot tell you what you did, because nothing on it knows whether the checkpoint on the fourteenth happened, whether the habit ran for nine days or two, or which goal has quietly not moved since March. That is the honest limit of every template, printed or otherwise, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send this sheet across and the goals, checkpoints and habits arrive as real records with their dates — then progress comes from what you tick off rather than from you remembering to come back and update a slider.

Questions

Life planning template, answered.

As a direction, yes. As a schedule, no — the useful ten-year plan says what kind of work and what kind of life, not which job at which company. The specificity belongs in the one-year and quarter columns, where you can actually see the terrain.
The quarter column every quarter, the year column annually, the top two rows every couple of years or after anything that genuinely changes the picture. Rewriting a ten-year direction every January is a sign it was never a direction.
That is the most valuable result the sheet produces. A quarter that has nothing to do with the ten-year row usually means the long view is decorative — either commit to it or replace it with the one your calendar already implies.
The parts that cost them something, yes. A ten-year direction that requires a move, a career change or a great deal of somebody's patience is not a private document, and finding that out late is the usual way these plans fail.
Download the PDF, or import it — the year and quarter goals become real goals with dates, and the whole plan is kept as a note you can open next January instead of starting from a blank page.

Keep the plan.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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