Craft a Plan for the Long-term
Managing the Early Days - Part 3
This carries on from last week’s post, you might want to check it out first.
I’m a goal setter. Every year, I do a semi-structured “Yearly Review” where I reflect on the last 12 months, and set goals for the next 12. But even as someone who loves goals, I struggle with setting them more than a year or two out. So when, on a whim, I used a life expectancy calculator and found I’ve got another 40 years to live, it did my head in. How do I set goals over a 40-year timeframe?!
It makes sense to create a high-level, long-term plan when you retire early and have decades to play with. This plan should start at the highest level, with your vision and values, which together act as a compass giving you a direction to head in.
Ideally, you’ve already reflected on your values after going through the last step.
The trickier part, at least for me, is nailing down a vision statement. It can be as simple as a short list of bullet points or even a one-liner, but even then I’ve struggled to articulate a personal vision. It’s slippery and hopefully, I’ll be able to get a firmer grasp on this soon. For now, the closest I’ve come to a vision was when my kids and I wrote a family mission statement a couple of years ago:
If your vision and values are the compass pointing you in a direction, the next step is to draw a map showing you the path to follow. This is the detail of the long-term plan and there are plenty of resources to help: HBR’s approach to creating a Life Strategy is solid, and I’ve just started reading Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. You might also want to take the Purpose in Life Quiz from Berkeley, which has some good ‘next steps’ based on your score. I’ve had good friends recommend the Life Plan Workbook too. Or using a framework like Yale’s What’s Next Matrix might help narrow down your choices.
As for me, I took a simpler approach.
I started by brainstorming my long-term goals. I already had some goals jotted down, and I used a few questions to help expand them: Picture yourself 40 years from now, looking back on your life. What do you want your story to be? What experiences, accomplishments, relationships, and interests should define the next four decades? What are your nearer-term 10-year goals? The “kids-have-left-home-now-what?” goals?
I also found breaking life into key areas helped organise my thoughts: health/fitness, finances, family, community, friends/relationships, hobbies, house, work, and spirituality. I’ve been writing my yearly goals under these headings for the last 14 years and they help ensure I’m looking at life holistically—I can see when I’m overloaded in one area (like hobbies) and neglecting another (usually friends/relationships).
You should do this brainstorming step too, and based on your answers—and guided by your vision and values—you can start mapping out a long-term plan.
Your long-term plan doesn’t need to be over-engineered: What resources, tools, people, or skills do you need to achieve these goals? And, crucially, what are the timeframes? As Bill Perkins says in Die With Zero, “Some experiences can be enjoyed only at certain times: Most people can’t go water-skiing in their nineties.” I saw this first-hand recently in the Galápagos Islands, when many of the elderly people on our once-in-a-lifetime cruise couldn’t manage the short walks or the amazing snorkelling. This was a good reminder to front-load some of my physically demanding goals—like travelling to Equatorial Guinea, doing the Tongariro Crossing in winter by moonlight, and kayaking the Cook Strait—and do them sooner rather than later.
I find it helpful to plan across three time horizons: short-term (the next 1-5 years), mid-term (5-10 years), and long-term (10-20 years and beyond). Perkins takes it a step further, suggesting you map out your life in 5-10 year “buckets” and assign your goals based on how much time, money, and health you’ll likely have at each stage. For example:
Naturally, the further out you plan, the fuzzier things get. My goals 20 years from now are pretty sparse—not because I don’t care, but because it’s hard to know what I’ll want, or be capable of, that far down the road.
And of course, you don’t want to over do it, your long-term plan shouldn’t be rigid. Think of it more as a flexible framework that helps you articulate what you want over the long run. For me, being flexible means I’ve already dumped a bunch of long-term goals that no longer fit my interests, skills or willingness to put in the time (like climbing all 3,000m peaks in New Zealand).
Right now, my long-term goals are mostly covered in these posts and include giving more money away, doing more to combat climate change, helping build a fairer society, focusing on investments and financial milestones, increasing my healthspan, and deepening my ties with the community. I’m gradually ticking off bucket list experiences, like visiting all 21 Spanish-speaking countries, exploring the best of New Zealand, and (soon-ish) hosting my 50th birthday party on a boat.
(Of course, your immediate priority might be to get your physical, mental, and emotional health back in check before this planning step. It depends on how you are landing in your early retirement. If you’re crawling out of a couple of decades of non-stop grind, after having neglected your health and relationships for a long time, then perhaps your first step is simply to rest and regain balance.)
Up next, thoughts on the power of structures and routine…