How To Make 2024 Your Best Year

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” — Bill Gates

But this applies in the reverse as well.

Most people underestimate how much their lives can change in a year because they look back at the last 10 years and don’t see much growth.

You can change that.

You can achieve more in 6 months to a year than you have in the last 10 years.

You can make this year the best year of your life so far.

This is a method I’ve used for the last 3 years of my life and I’ve seen my life change in drastic ways.

I can it the 3-3-3 Method:

3 Goals

3 Months

3 Priorities

3 Goals

There are 2 main reasons that people fail to achieve their goals each year:

1. They don’t have clear goals

2. They have too many goals

Success requires simplicity and clarity. Without either, your chances of success decrease drastically.

Your working memory is limited holding 3 - 5 items of meaningful information. Though this can increase to seven plus or minus two (Miller, 1956), it tends to decrease to three or four when language such as short sentences or idioms are involved (Gilchrist, Cowan, & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008).

So to avoid overwhelming your mind, have 3 clear goals for the year.

By having 3 goals, you have more energy and effort to invest towards these goals and can better manage your time throughout the year towards these goals, whilst living your life.

Figure out what you want and keep it clear and simple.

Why?

Well, look around you and see where not knowing what you want gets you.

People either give up at the beginning of the year because they bite more than they can chew or they get to the end of the year having achieved nothing because it was too complicated.

Avoid this.

Figure out the dream life you want to achieve and live.

Identify 3 goals that you can achieve this year that will make the dream life possible.

The more vivid and clear your vision more the future is, the easier it is to identify the goals.

Without it, you’ll set goals that have no meaning or too many goals.

Next, 3 Months.

This was a game changer for me and the single most powerful reframe that allowed me to start making 3 - 4x the progress in one year than ever before.

If you’re into self-improvement and productivity, you’ve been taught to set goals based on what you can achieve in a year.

And this is where Bill Gates’s wisdom comes in to remind us:

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year…”

We make the mistake of assuming because we have an entire year, “we have enough time.”

This is why some people add more goals or lose track of their goals and don’t take action towards them until it’s too late.

This is Parkinson’s Law at work:

“Work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.”

So instead of sabotaging yourself, why not use time to your benefit and get 3 - 4 times more done in a year than you have before?

This idea comes from the 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington.

The book introduces you to a new paradigm that allows you to get more done in 12 weeks than you have in 12 months.

By focusing on months instead of years, you shorten the execution cycle of your goals and increase your productivity.

How to Apply it for Yourself:

1. Break down your year into four quarters.

   • Q1: Jan to March

   • Q2: April to June

   • Q3: July to September

   • Q4: October to December

2. For each quarter, take one of your yearly goals and break it down across the quarters. Or for one quarter focus on one goal.
   
   Since you have 4 quarters to work with, Q1 could be dedicated to all 3 goals but broken down into smaller, manageable goals.
   
   If one of your goals is to launch a new project, Q1 could be dedicated to you learning about the backends and acquiring the necessary skills.

   Q2 could be dedicated to building the first version and Q3 could be the launch.

   And Q4 could be getting feedback and working on version two.
   
   Or you could break it down differently depending on what the goal is and how big it is.
   
   Or you might want to challenge yourself to achieve your year-long goal in Q1.
   

Keep in mind that you might not achieve the goal in Q1, but you could be steps closer to the goal or learn some valuable lessons that will help you in the next quarter.

Either way, you’ll be making more progress in those 3 months than ever before.

But you might surprise yourself and achieve the goal in 3 months, proving to yourself that you are capable of far more than you knew.

Finally, 3 Priorities.

Finally, once you have your goals and 3 months planned out, you want to reverse engineer the process.

Break down each of your goals into a daily action.

A task that you can focus on completing every single day that over time will add up to your goals and therefore you moving toward your dream life.

This is crucial.

If you aren’t working towards your goals every single day in some way, how can you expect to succeed? To get better?

If you don’t take action each day, you’re missing out on two powerful forces when it comes to getting ahead — the compound effect and momentum.

Another reason people fail to make progress towards their goals is because they can’t focus or prioritise.

Everyone talks about focus, but what they don’t tell you is that you can focus on the wrong things.

The 3-3-3 Method is designed to create focus and clarity.

It gets you to focus on the right things and to direct your attention to what matters.

This doesn’t mean that everything else in your life fades away while you work towards your goals, but it forces you to commit to them and prioritise them.

To focus on the right things.

When you do this, you will realise that other things in your life are distractions, or tasks you can do later.

You learn to differentiate between important and urgent.

The more centralised your focus can be, the deeper you can focus.

And the work you do towards your goals each day needs to be in a state of deep focus and flow.

Prioritising focused work on your goals in the pursuit of progress is essential.

Without focus, you’re going to suffer, hence your results and progress will suffer and you’re going to be much less productive.

These tasks that you broke your goal down into are the micro focus that over time adds up to the macro focus of your goals and dream life.

If you want to change your life, you have to focus on these and do them daily.

Most people underestimate how much their lives can change in a year because they look back at the last 10 years and don’t see much growth.

You can make more progress in one year than you have in the last 10 years by implementing a new system.

The 3-3-3 Method.

Set 3 goals so that you are intentional and clear about what you want to achieve

Move away from the old model of thinking in 12 months to thinking in 12 weeks (3 months) and make 3 - 4x more progress than ever before.

Experience the power of the compounding effect and moment by focusing on 3 priorities that move you closer towards your goals each day.

Do this and make 2024 the best year you’ve had so far.