How I’m planning my goals for 2026

If you set goals in January and now you don't remember what they are anymore, trust me, you are not alone. I've talked about this crazy stat before but 92% of people actually fail to meet their New Year's resolution and I don't think it's just because they lack willpower or discipline. I think it's something deeper than that. I'm doing my end of the year review and reset today along with some New Year planning and some systems building to make sure that I am accomplishing everything that I want to accomplish next year and I've been using the same system for the last two or three years and it's helped me quit my tech job, start a business, and get to where I am today. So if you have also been wanting to do your New Year's planning, I'm going to show you my exact system so that you can do the same. Jumping right in, I always do a reflection before I dive into the actual planning because I'm a firm believer that if you don't know where you are, you can't figure out where you're going. When I do any sort of reflection, whether it's quarterly, monthly, or in this case annually, I always like to start with a wheel of life exercise which I talk about all the time but because it is just so effective in getting an at-a-glance look at how you are feeling about each area, each of the most critical areas of your life. So how it works is you just draw a circle, you break it down into nine separate parts, and each of those slices or portions of the circle represents one of the key areas of your life and the nine key areas that makes up everyone's life is mind, body, soul, which represents the health of your life, career, purpose, money, which represents the work in your life, and then friendships, family, and love, which represents the relationships in your life. And then you just go and give a rating out of 10 for each of those sections based on how you are feeling about that portion of your life. So for example, I rated my mind as a 6 because lately I've been kind of struggling with some of the So 6 to me feels like it's not bad by any means but there's work to be done. For body, I rated it an 8 because I did recently start personal training so I've been on a more consistent fitness schedule which makes me feel really proud. Under soul, I wrote 7 because soul to me is like it's not your mind, it's not your body, it's how you feed your joy and for me that often comes in Have I been prioritizing other things in my life that kind of bring me joy and I think because work has been so busy this season I haven't been doing it as much as I would like to so 7 to me feels more like okay it's better than a 6 for sure, it's definitely good but again work to be done. Under career, I wrote 9 because career has really been popping off for me this season which is such a blessing and honestly the busyness is such a good problem to have and I just want to make sure that I am keeping track of all these other areas of my life as well and I'm not just solely focusing on career and like abandoning my health which is something that I used to do. Money is 8 because obviously if my career is doing well I am doing well in the opportunities section as well but I do think that I could do more financial projections, maybe have more conversations with an accountant, maybe just do more like personal budgeting and financial planning so that's why it's an 8. Purpose I have is an 8 as well. I feel so aligned between my work and my personal purpose and the things that I want to achieve in my lifetime and so it's looking really good. I think it could even be sharper and clearer which is one of my goals for 2026. Under family, I have it as 7. I have started to hang out with my siblings again more because they live in the city that I live in but my parents don't so I want to give them calls more and just check up on them more. Friends I actually have as 9 as well because I have been spending so much quality time with my friends and I'm feeling really good about like where I am at with my friendships and the effort that I'm putting in in that area of my life. And then love I have as 6. I did go through a breakup this year, it's something that I'm healing from, it's something that I feel like I am still sort of clarifying the learnings of and while I'm not currently like in a relationship, romantic love is still something that obviously is very important to me and so I think 6 because again there's work to be done and I think that that's something that I can maybe like maybe even plan for for 2026 you know go on more dates or whatever that looks like. When I do my reflection there's always some key questions that I sort of ponder or journal about as well so some of them are what worked this year you know what went well, what felt like it worked really seamlessly, and then what didn't. I think those things are always good to consider. Also think about the patterns that you're noticing comparing this year alone but also this year to previous years. Are there specific things that keep coming up? Are there patterns that keep showing up in your life that probably means that you need to address it or maybe it is a good pattern that you need to continue? And then what do I want to feel differently about next year? That's always a question that I like to ask before I dive into the goal setting because this question isn't talking about like what do you want to accomplish in the next year it's how do you want to feel about it like at the end of the year when you're looking back at the next year how do you want to feel about it? All of these questions and your wheel of life starts to act as this guide for when you are actually doing your goal setting and your systems building because you do need to consider kind of this holistic look at your life and not just you know metrics and numbers and kind of set goals like willy-nilly. I do actually have a notion worksheet that includes all of these prompts and some other prompts that I personally like to use when reflecting on my year so if you want to find that it's linked in the description box below. The shift for me I think that made the biggest difference was to stop setting just like year-long new year's resolutions and actually break my year down into quarters and months. I have started to read the book the 12-week year and a lot of it has just been validating of the process that I sort of created for myself. I honestly just took quarters from working in tech and sort of thinking about my objectives at work in quarters and I kind of just applied it to my own life because that's the whole 12-week year philosophy is that a whole year is just too much time it's giving yourself too much freedom and we actually need more structure than that to accomplish our goals. When you narrow things down into 12 weeks which approximately come out to be a quarter, it just helps you to create more urgency and clarity on exactly what you need to do to actually reach your overarching goal. So instead of setting maybe like 10 goals for the entire year and only accomplishing three, you're actually just setting three goals per quarter to make sure that you can actually accomplish them and then by the end of the year you would have accomplished 12 goals instead of 10. Now by no means am I saying to forget about your long-term visions and your long-term goals or even to stop setting goals for the year. I think the way that I like to look at it is there are your long-term goals which are three to ten years from now, there are your mid-term goals which are one to three years from now, and then there's your current goals which are broken down into quarters or months. So here's what my current annual system looks like. I'm actually planning to change how this is laid out today and we're gonna do that together because I think that there are things that can be improved about this layout but you'll see I have my yearly manifesto and intentions, then I have kind of this like summary of monthly goals and quarterly goals which you can see I didn't fill out for Q4. After that I have my vision board which I always do one. This was the one for 2025 which honestly is looking really good like we have accomplished a lot of these things. The next most important section is the execute section and this is where you can start to see my quarterly planning. So I personally still like to use the OKR method which I stole from my tech career. OKR essentially stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is the framework, the backbone to how I organize everything in Notion and all it really is just to simplify it is you start with an objective and then you break down the key results or the actionable steps that lead you to accomplishing that objective. So for example if I have read 50 books as an objective the key results would be to read 12 and a half books every quarter or I had the goal of moving to Europe this year which is still pending don't worry but that could be broken down into like Q1 I have the key result of create budget look into pet travel agency and then Q2 I have change my health insurance, sell my unused furniture, etc etc. Underneath that is where I start to do my monthly tracking which is one of the spaces that I want to improve and update because it just got a little bit like messy and too long but I always leave space for my ins, my outs, my intentions of the month and then what I'm grateful for what went well and then what could have gone better and then maybe some like small random goals that I want to fit in. I talk about this template a lot in my plan with me videos that I was doing early in the year so I'll link those down below if you want to watch those. If you've been watching me for a while you'll know that my entire life lives within Notion like when I say I do everything in Notion that is not a joke I track what I read, I track what I eat, I run my entire business off of Notion all my goals are in Notion like everything lives within Notion and don't get me wrong while I love designing and creating Notion databases for myself it does actually eat up quite a lot of bit of my time especially when I create a complicated system if you haven't heard of the Notion AI agent it essentially acts as a Notion super user that also knows everything that you've done within Notion and how you like to work and then it works for you so it can do stuff like search, read, decide, update, notify, and then execute the tasks that you want to do. It can also build pretty much anything that you need in Notion so it can create and edit pages but it can also edit, customize, query, and like enrich the databases that you already have or the databases that you want to create. So I'm going to show you the prompt that I built out to actually give to my Notion agent to help me create this new 2026 goal setting reflections database that I'm going to use that is just a lot more streamlined than what I have right now. So here's the prompt I'm going to give my Notion AI agent it says please create a goals workspace that includes a space to write my long-term vision, a space to write my midterm goal, an objectives database, a key results database, just bold that, a quarterly planning database, a monthly reflections page template, and connections between all the databases. And then I even listed out sort of like the properties that I want kind of based on what I had before so the objective, the category, the year, the primary quarter, the status, why it matters, and then it's the same for the key results database. So let's put this into my agent and let's see what it's able to create. Okay here's what my Notion AI agent was able to build up for me this is my new goals workspace. Obviously I'm going to probably tweak like the aesthetics maybe add a cover photo and stuff like that but as far as the structure goes I think it nailed what I wanted exactly and I actually think these little boxes that I created for my monthly reflections looks a lot cleaner than what I had before. We have our objectives database so my main objective, the status, the category, the main quarter it falls under, why it matters which I don't think I have that in my previous database but I think that's a great feel to have, the year, and then the relations to the key results database, the quarters database, and then it actually created a relation back to my original years template which is kind of cool. Then I have my key results database which has the key results, which objective it's related to, what quarter it fits in, why it matters, year, all the same categories there, and then my quarterly planning database which shows each of the quarters and then that's going to link to like what are the key results in that quarter that I'm focused on and what are the objectives that it's related to. So how I would typically use something like this is I'll start with the objective of the year so it could be again something like move to Europe, maybe it's read 60 books next year, and then break them down into the key results that it would take for me quarter to quarter to accomplish those objectives and taking a tip from the book The Twelve Week Year, I'm going to try to just have three main key results for each quarter so that things don't feel as overwhelming and that I can really prioritize and focus on very specific areas of my life. Okay I finished my lunch, I filled out some of my objectives for next year so I wanted to share. I also made some edits to the workspace so I just put my long-term vision and midterm vision which I haven't written out yet but I will, into little boxes and then I put my 2026 vision board because we have to have our vision boards, okay that helps a lot. So underneath we have our objectives and key results. I still want to add some objectives but I think for now this is a good start and it's something that I'm just going to probably work on for the next few days as I think about things and journal more but I have so far hit 200k on YouTube which we are getting reasonably close, I'm at 150k when this video was made so I'm really hoping to grow more on this channel and really just continue to like create valuable content that helps people on here and yeah I think that's like a nice goal for me to have for this next year. I have developed consistent meditation practice, I was pretty consistent for I want to say like the first half of the year and then it started to fall off so that's something that I really want to focus on for 2026. Stay consistent with my fitness, that is a huge goal of mine. Move to Europe, adding that back in. Build kinship, I have been working on kinship so much with my co-founder Terry and it's something that really is just a passion of mine and holds such a like special place in my heart because of the values that it represents so that is definitely a big goal of mine and then build connection with family because we're all across the world now, my stepdad is in Dubai, my mom is in China so it just I want to make sure that I am like maintaining and upkeeping those relationships as much as I can so under key results you can start to see how it all breaks down and I did fill in like the categories that each thing fits under but for example for the objective build kinship I'll put it here maybe, I have host two small community dinners that's something that I want to do especially when I'm in Europe then you'll actually see that I break down the key results by quarter as well so to hit 200k on YouTube something that I need to do is produce consistent YouTube videos so in each quarter I'm going to produce 12 YouTube videos which is about four YouTube videos a month then for fitness I have workout four times a week and I want and then I repeated that for each quarter as well so q1 q2 q3 q4 and then same with meditation meditate four times a week doing that in each of the quarters and I just repeat it in this way so that when I'm actually looking at the quarters view I can see okay these are the things that I need to focus on in this quarter and then I can like check it off I'm really excited to continue to customize my new Notion dashboard and really make it feel like my own I'll probably add in some more imagery maybe some emojis and just continue to sort of build on and work on this throughout the year but I'm really liking how clean and simple it looks compared to my old dashboard if you've also been wanting to use Notion to build any sort of dashboard on your own I would highly highly recommend checking out their AI agent it can actually do so much more than just build things for you I honestly just use it straight up like an AI chat now so if I need to brainstorm some ideas or if I need it to do some research for me I'm doing it all in that sidebar on my Notion which honestly is so much easier because I do all the typing and all the note-taking in Notion anyways so now I don't have to like swipe away to ChatGPT or swipe away to Cloud I can just stay within Notion so give it a try and let me know your thoughts on the Notion agent and how you like it I'll put the link and all the information in the description box below so give it a try let it do all the work for you and come back here and let me know what you think of Notion agent I'll put the link and all the details in the description box below but that's it for today's video I would also like to know what content you would like to see in 2026 because I have also been doing my content planning for the next year so if you have any ideas or any specific formats or types of videos that you prefer to see for me please feel free to let me know in the comments down below it helps me a lot when I'm trying to plan out what my content calendar looks like other than that I hope you're having an amazing day wherever you are in the world and I will see you in my next video bye