Hi, and welcome to Best Laid Plans, the podcast about planning, planners, planning techniques, and anything planner adjacent.

This is Sarah Hardunger, and I'm coming at you towards the end of the year.

I have to admit I had been thinking about doing an episode focused on goal setting for quite some time and found myself a bit blocked.

I'm not sure what it is.

This year has been a little bit different and I'm sure it's been that way for all of us listening to this podcast and maybe you too have struggled with setting your goals for

2021. Delving in a little bit to why, I don't know. Part of me thinks that it's just that there

is so much more uncertainty in what the coming year might look like. We don't know if perhaps the

year will open up halfway through and we'll be able to get to things that we've been thinking

about for a long time. Or maybe it's going to look a lot more like 2020 with, you know, limited options

for certain things based on how the pandemic goes. We definitely have a lot more, I don't know,

just blank space thinking about what the year is going to look like when a vaccine might be

rolled out, whether it's going to work, whether this pandemic is going to come to a close, what things

are going to look like politically, just a lot of uncertainty. And so I think that makes

goal setting more difficult because you're trying to paint your goals onto kind of a blurry

background. The other thing is that I think many of us, including myself, feel a little bit

burned or scarred by our 2020 goal setting process. It actually pains me a bit to look back at

the goals I set in the end of 2019 thinking about how wonderful the year 2020 was going to be.

I was turning 40 or I did turn 40 this year, which was a big number,

and I had the most travel of any year of my life planned out for 2020.

Not only did I have it planned, but I had a lot of it booked because that's how I roll as a planner.

Clearly, that didn't work out so well as pretty much none of those

trips got taken except for maybe one in March before everything hit. But that hurts to look at a

...