Divide by Ten

At the end of the year, I had a wrap-up meeting with the financial advisors I coach. Each of them is in a different stage in their business, yet there was a common thread among many of them: they fell short of their intended 2022 goals. I did some digging to find out where things went wrong, especially so it wouldn’t inadvertently happen again in 2023.

Here’s what I discovered: Each of the advisors claimed to have “run out of time” at the end of the year.

It was that simple. Business didn’t close quickly enough, their clients pushed off a lot of decision-making until the New Year, and the holidays were a total distraction. Before they knew it, 2022 had ended. It was not that the goals they set were too lofty. It was that the timeframe they allotted wasn’t long enough.

In their minds, they ran out of time.

Did this happen to you? Did you set goals for 2022, but ran out of time and didn’t get to accomplish them?

Would you like to know how to never fall short of time again?

For 2023, you need to change your math. So many people make a very common mistake when planning out their goals for the next 12 months.

Maybe you have a workout goal or a weight-loss goal. Perhaps you plan to clean out your basement and purge all unnecessary items before year-end, or you want to read 52 books by December. You set a goal for the calendar year, but then you make a math mistake.

You divide everything by 12.

Why is this a mistake, you wonder? After all, that’s how many months are in each year, right?

Setting annual goals, then dividing everything by 12, does not leave any room for life to happen. And if you don’t account for life, more often than not you will fall short of your goals.

For example, let’s say you get the flu and you’re out of work unexpectedly for a week (or two). Or let’s say you plan to treat the family and rent the beach house for longer than normal and give yourself an extended vacation. Maybe your assistant goes out on maternity leave and you’re less productive for the eight weeks she’s gone. Or worse, a key sales person on your team quits unexpectedly and your business is derailed for a month while you have to hire and train someone new. These are not hypothetical examples. Each of these things happened within my group of advisors in the past year. And every single event— positive or negative— set them back in terms of productivity. This is life. And make no mistake, issues and unexpected derailments will happen again in 2023 as they always do.

The problem is that we forget to account for them in advance when we set our goals and intentions for the year.

When planning your goals for the New Year, and accounting for life, I recommend that instead of dividing by 12, you divide by 10. Recalibrate all of your annual goals to be done by the end of October. If you make this change, one of two things will happen: you will finish your year early, crush your goals, and have lower-than-normal-stress in November and December. Or the other option is that you fall short by October, but have November and December to wrap up final details and perhaps still finish your year successfully. Either way, you’ll be in better shape than you were this year when you were scrambling to piece it all together in December unsuccessfully.

It might sound like you’ll need to front-load more work into the beginning of the year if you do the math of dividing by 10. And you’d be correct. I also think you might appreciate and be motivated by this new accelerated approach. What a faster, more productive, more focused way to start a new year!

You know who will love it even more than you? Your staff, your kids, your family, and your spouse. Why? Because you won’t be the stressed-out, frenetic, grouchy, disappointed guy/gal you were at the end of 2022.

Am I right?

If you want to give yourself a gift in 2023, give yourself the gift of new math. Set annual goals, but this time divide by ten.

Do you have quarterly goals? Divide by three quarters instead of four, and see how much you can get accomplished by the end of September rather than pushing hard and stressing out at the end of December— and finding yourself having to compete with holidays, vacations, sickness, or your kids on school break resenting that you’re still working and not relaxing and celebrating with them.

Map out your upcoming year as if you only have three quarters, not four. Or ten months, not twelve. Your 2023 year-end relaxed, chipper self will be thanking you!