If you live and work in a success-oriented way, you cannot avoid annual planning. Goals should be defined, measured and controlled. For this purpose I prepared the Excel template for the planning of the coming year.
How exactly each individual takes it is of course a matter of taste. Therefore, I do not want to prescribe anything here, but only give as much help as possible to make 2021 successful.
The annual planner can be used professionally for projects, internal company matters, personnel, budget and others; privately for relationships, partnerships, marriage, sports, nutrition, raising children, etc.
Using the annual planer for 2021
First, download the template at the end of the article and open it with a spreadsheet program of your choice (usually probably Microsoft Excel). Now you will see several worksheets at the bottom. One for each application area:
- Annual planner 2021
- 2021 in monthly representation
- Weekly planner 2021
- Target definitions (SMART targets)
- Annual, monthly, weekly and daily targets as one-thing-definition
In the year planner it is only a rough overview of the year 2021, where you can enter for example birthdays, celebrations and vacations.
On the following worksheets, each month is displayed individually. Here you can enter more detailed information.
Even more specific is the week display. With scrolling down you can see each calendar week of the year 2021, ideal for detailed yearly planning.
SMART targets can be stored in the correspondingly named worksheet. Pay attention to the criteria: Specific, measurable, accepted, realistic and terminable. You can copy and paste the checkmarks or crosses and then use them frequently to mark the individual criteria columns. Don’t be surprised if “terminable” is marked as not possible – this is sometimes the case with SMART targets.
For the usage of the SMART formula you will find a good article here.
The last tab is for the so-called One Thing goals, based on the bestseller “the One Thing” by Gary Keller*. The author describes how successful you can be if you really concentrate on just one thing. You establish your core competence, so to speak, and try to work out and improve it more and more. Free under the motto, if you try to catch 2 pigs at the same time, you won’t get one.
I personally liked the book very much. Especially in today’s world with all the distractions of social media, internet, Netflix etc. the concentration and focus on the essential is like a relief.
Download the planner for 2021 [Excel template]
Here you can download the Excel file. If the template helped you, I would be very happy about a small “coffee” donation:
Some more plans for 2021 found online
Here are sources I found pretty usefull, too:
The german version of the annual planner can be found here:
https://excel-vorlagen.net/jahresplanung-2021-excelvorlage/