I recently completed my annual review of my personal 5-year plan, and I wanted to share some insights on long-term planning and a simple framework for creating your own plan.
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I remember being asked about my plans when I graduated high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in two weeks, much less a year. But I’ve personally experienced the benefits of long-term planning.
Recently, I completed my annual review of my own personal 5-year plan, and I wanted to share some insights about creating a long-term plan for your life as a believer and a simple framework you can use for planning. But let’s begin with a biblical justification for this kind of planning.
Biblical Basis for Long-Term Planning
Diligence Tends to Lead to Abundance
The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.
– Proverbs 21:5
Here diligence is contrasted with hastiness. It has a long-term view instead of a short-term one.
You might be productive daily, but if you don’t expand your time horizon, you’ll likely get in trouble. For example, get rich quick schemes vs. slow, methodical investing.
The same is true when we seek to live a life of faithfulness. We want to think with an eternal mindset. How do I become faithful in all areas of life and increase in those things for a lifetime?
Longitudinal planning is a subset of this. We break our lives down into 10-year or 5-year chunks and say, “what would faithfulness look like in 5 years in these various areas?”
Diligence is the hard work of planning ahead. I talk about this in Well Done, that one of the marks of the faithful steward was that they were diligent.
He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more.
– Matthew 25:16
Part of being diligent is planning ahead. So planning isn’t a lack of faith; it’s an act of faithfulness.
Long-Term Planning is the Opposite of Laziness
The Hebrew word for diligence we saw in Proverbs 21:5 is repeatedly contrasted with sloth and laziness (Proverbs 12:24; 13:4)
And in Proverbs 6:9-11 the sloth’s problem was that he wouldn’t plan ahead. He thought only of today’s pleasures.
Biblical Examples
Joseph exemplified long-term planning through his guidance to Pharaoh. He advised storing surplus grain during seven years of abundance to prepare for the subsequent seven years of famine. This strategy saved Egypt and ensured his own family’s survival (Genesis 41:25-40).
The apostle Paul exemplified long-term planning as well. He intended to visit Rome en route to Spain (Romans 15:23-32) and made preparations for future ministry following his release from imprisonment (Philippians 1:19-26).
My 5-Year Plan
In the early hours of July 14th, 2020, while vacationing with my family and some friends at Lake Michigan, I pulled out my laptop and started writing about where I’d like to see myself in five years.
Every year since 2020, I’ve taken the day off on July 14th to write a yearly progress update, review my 5-year plan, and read through all my previous yearly updates.
This year was no different, except that I am now 4 years into the plan. And I am just amazed at how much progress I’ve made on each item in my plan. So I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you about how I’ve managed this 5-year plan, and hopefully get some ideas from you on how I can improve the process.
The plan consists of three parts: the big vision, goals for each of my domains of stewardship, and a spot where I add my yearly updates.
Big Vision
Here’s what I wrote back in 2020:
By July of 2025 I want to be living on a wooded acreage with my family, be successful enough through my writing and videos to have time to hobby farm with my family and develop 10–25% food self-sufficiency. I want to be walking with the Lord daily, servings in a local church, and be in good enough health to do manual labor.
I know some of those seem a little weird. But the even CRAZIER thing than my prepper tendencies is that when I wrote this, I was still living in California, and all of these things looked like a far-off dream. I had no plan for how to get there, and many of my obligations at the time made most of those goals impossible. I just knew this was the lifestyle I’d like to have for our family, so I wrote it down.
Since then, we’ve moved into our house in the woods, and this spring, I finally started a decent-sized food garden, and most of the other things on that list are currently true or very close to true.
As I mention all the time here, when we do goal-setting exercises, writing your goals down is powerful. Something about clearly articulating what you’re trying to achieve gets you to marshal your focus toward reaching those ends. And that has 100% been my experience with longitudinal planning like this.
Domains
I wrote this document before I developed the domains of stewardship framework. And I plan to build my next plan using the 6 domains of stewardship we teach in RPA. But so far, I’ve stuck with the original categories I wrote down in 2020:
Here’s an example of my little goals under “family”:
I made this in LogSeq, which is why it has that weird formatting. The numbers on the right correspond to the four yearly updates I’ve done since I began.
Here’s another one from the category “Personal development.” (I’d maybe rename this “intellectual” to fit with the updated Domains of Stewardship and move some of the goals to other categories. But you get the idea):
Yearly Updates
Every year, I review the entire document and write a progress report for each bullet point.
For example, for my writing domain, I had the goal of writing 5 books by 2025. This was what I wrote about that goal for my 3-year update:
While the overall vision hasn’t changed much, I allow myself to adapt the goals as I go. You don’t want to stick with a goal that’s no longer relevant or important to you.
How This Plan Has Helped Me
I’ve made several very big decisions in the past five years that I don’t think I could have made if I didn’t have the clarity that this 5-year plan provided me.
The first was quitting Grace to You to move back near family in Michigan. Even though I loved that job and was set up for a life-long career there, this document helped me see clearly how high a premium I placed on family. So we made the sacrifice.
Second, I don’t think I would have gone full-time with Redeeming Productivity if I hadn’t had this written plan. I didn’t follow the (probably wiser) path of waiting until I was actually making an income from RP before going all in. I just knew that this ministry checked so many of the boxes of what I believed God was calling me to do with my life, and I saw a path forward where doing this full-time could be a vehicle for creating the lifestyle my wife and I desired for our family. It was having the written plan that made that clear enough that we were willing to take the risk.
What Do You Think?
Do you have something like this you look to? How might I improve this planning process?
