When I first made the decision to start this blog, I didn’t know exactly what it will be for and what I’ll write about.
That made it super hard to decide what to have the first post about.
I’m thinking about writing the first post for weeks now and didn’t make any progress. In order to motivate me to finally write this post I used some help from a friend, but this story is a subject for another post.

To make it all clear in my mind and easier to make any progress, I realized that the first step is to understand how I define the best year, then I decided to make it the subject for this post as it lays the basics for everything this blog is about.

When I decided to have this blog it was on a yearly milestone – my birthday.
At this time of the year, and on a few other occasions (like a new year, starting a job, leaving a job… etc) I am thinking about how I changed since last year, what have I achieved, how close I am to my goals, what progress I did and how my goals have changed during the year.
At the same time, I think about the upcoming year, and what I want to achieve until next year / the next milestone.

I don’t think I had even one year that I was pleased with what I’ve achieved in the past year.
It’s not that I am at the same place for years now, I do make a lot of progress and achieve stuff, but:

1. I don’t have clear goals that I can really compare to my current state.
2. I want to do a lot more, and I know I’m capable of it.

So the first step to having the best year would be setting clear and measurable goals. Goals that you cannot measure are bad goals. When the goals are unmeasurable, it’s impossible to specify if you achieved them or not.

Even though I haven’t done it every year, I did set goals a few times, but setting them is still only the first step.
Following those goals, each and every day is nearly impossible. We have so much stuff in our lives that dealing every day with the yearly goals is overwhelming. Waking on a random Tuesday in the middle of the year and thinking about the goals that I’m nowhere close to yet, can affect the opposite way – it can lead to stress and giving up before even trying.
Instead, we need to have hierarchical order of goals. Having yearly goals is important but, setting also monthly, weekly, and daily goals are super important. Each level should be aligned with its parent level:
My daily goals should lead me to achieve my weekly goals. My weekly goals to my monthly goals and my monthly goals to my yearly goals.
Now, waking up on a random Tuesday with a goal/task like summarizing a paper about some new research would be far more effective than thinking about that I want to finish my professional book about something. Maybe the goal for this week would be to organize all the material about one subject that will sum up to a lot of information with the goals of multiple weeks, then on the following months I’ll have goals of writing a chapter each month then I’ll have the whole book at the end of the year.
So setting medium and small-term goals would be the second step.
I’ll do it on daily basis. Every day I’ll have to set my goals for the day, every week for the week, and every month for the month. It’s possible and even necessary to plan it somewhat ahead but things change, so we should adapt and alter our goals accordingly.

Now, a year that:

1. I set some clear, realistic but also ambitious goals as I described above.
2. At the end of the year, I’ll mark most of the goals as achieved.
3. I’ll be happy with how much I achieved, how much I tried to achieve, and how better I am than last year.

That would be the definition of the best year.

A little disclaimer about the goals:
I think that goals can change over time, even during the year. So changing the goals I started with at the beginning of the year is probable and absolutely fine. It should be conscious and affect the next actions immediately.