An optimal timeframe for planning an ambitious life.
You should have a 5 year plan. It should describe what you want your day-to-day life to be in 5 years time. What will you have accomplished? What will you have? Who will you be? Where will you be?
Ask yourself ‘what about that person is different from the person I am now?‘. How can you convert those differences into an actionable, milestone-driven (SMART Goals) plan?
OKRs and the Antifragile Planning Method both would have you select some results to accomplish in the next ~3 months, and work towards your 5 year plan in quarterly steps.
👉 There is a reason "5 year plans" are 5 years. There is not enough room in 2 years to accomplish a well controlled whole-life change. 7 years gets to the point where you're planning things that will be preempted by circumstances that come up in the next ~4 years.
Often when you ask people to describe their lives to to this point, they tend to break their story up into ~2-to-4 year chunks. During these years I did (whatever), then I started to get into (something different), then I (moved/started school/changed jobs/life event). This is the realm of Horizon 4 from David Allen’s Six Horizons of Focus - and fall somewhere in between the top 2 levels of the Antifragile Planning Method.
Source
- Designing Your Life
- Antifragile Planning (article)
- Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity