How was 2021 for you? Did you achieve everything you wanted? Don’t worry if not. There’s a whole new year coming.

New energy, new hopes. In order to accomplish more and more, though, it’s time you started to organize your goals and projects, in case you didn’t yet.

The last three years were very hard on everyone since the pandemic beginning, but they also brought lessons and opportunities to rethink our lifestyle and businesses.

Now, it’s the moment for you to organize all those insights you had during the year, with the help of the Gitscrum project management tool, and make decisions about when to put them into practice.

How to Start?

In GitScrum, you can create different projects for your personal life and business. No matter if you are updating previous plans or elaborating one for the first time, you can follow these steps:

Project Workflow Set with Kanban Boards

For your personal life project, you can choose and apply a simple free GitScrum workflow template, or create a template with boxes for different life areas (health, family, career, house, car, trips, etc). There, you will include your goals in form of tasks and manage them during the year and move them forward.

For your business, choose from a variety of pre-made free templates that might be appropriate to your routine, or utilize a simple model that fits every business flow with basic task stages (to do, in progress, waiting for approval, in review, done).

2021 Evaluation

Inside each one of your projects:
– Analyze/list what went right and what went wrong this year;
– Tick the goals/tasks you achieved vs. the one pending;
– List new goals directly as tasks in your GitScrum Board, so they will be ready to be executed and moved to “done” (at this stage, list all goals you feel like, for you to filter later).

Goals Time-frame

Now, it’s time to organize the time range for each of your tasks and goals. What we understand by short and long term might vary, so here we present a suggestion you can use or adapt as you wish:

Short-term goals – up to one year

Mid-term goals – up to 3 years

Long-term goals – 3 to 10 years, or more

Use your Gitscrum task cards to set your task due dates, alerts and notifications. If you create a project and invite more people to work on some tasks with you, you can create GitScrum Sprints to engage the team towards the goals.

Purpose Definition, Goals Filtering, or Adapting

Many times, we list many things that we want, but in fact we don’t know why we want them. So, we need to think strategically and wonder which goals are truly important for us as professionals and individuals, which ones corroborate our purpose.

GOALS are where we want to get. PURPOSE is why we want so. Everyone and every business have a purpose in life.

Examples of goal(s) evaluation:

“Take the course ‘XYZ’ ” (?)
Why do I want this specific course?
How will it contribute to my life/career?
Is it worth the value?
Are there other options/means to learn?
Do I need a certificate?

“Buy a house at the beach” (?)
Can I afford the maintenance?
Will I be available to enjoy it often?
Why buy instead of rent?
Is it a good investment?

“Travel abroad for vacation” (?)
Will the currency be favorable?
Will this expense not impact my budget?
How will this trip benefit me?
Is this a good opportunity?

After thinking over each goals, then you will be able to “freeze” them for the future, adapt them or eliminate them. Remember you shouldn’t start the year already overwhelmed with too many things to do. Choose a few ambitious but attainable goals and move forward.

Another criteria that companies take into consideration when filtering goals is the scenario view (threats and opportunities) and internal evaluation.

They run the SWOT analysis, listing Strenghts, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats for the company when they update their strategic planning. Considering market trends, contemporary issues and your potential is determining to make your goals possible. You can do this by elaborating a GitScrum Mind Mapping inside your project.

Means, References and Contacts

For each goal you create as a task, you can facilitate the next step of your work, including references and suggestions of which means you think could be used to it.

Mention techniques, tools, funding sources, potential partnerships or counselors, people you could ask for information from. In your business, when you create tasks and include references for execution, use GitScrum interactive features for team communication in task cards.

Previous Budget

As it is only a new year’s planning, you won’t have enough data to elaborate detailed project budgeting yet. However, previous budgeting with GitScrum Spreadsheet also helps you order and plan the execution of your tasks, according to your reality.

This way, you will know if there is a need to seek for sponsorships, partnerships or co-owning.

In case you have no idea how much to invest in something, you should probably ask someone who works with it, or look up it on Google. Add an additional 20%, considering you might take some time until the due date.

Plan Counseling

Including consultancy, training or specialized coaching focused on the areas you are willing to pursue can help you focus on your goals to reach them more consistently.

If you are updating the company’s plan, hold a coordinator responsible for the strategic plan reviews and goal recalls, so the team always works focused on them.

Establish a Routine with the GitScrum Board

Your projects plan are not made to be stuck in a virtual folder and reviewed next december. Make the GitScrum Board your daily and weekly working platform, move tasks forward and see the progress in your life, smoothly but seriously.

What we believe is that planing, project management and daily working are integrated. Many people imagine planning is a distant thing for big companies consultants or philosophers. But that’s what distinguishes amateurs from professionals.

Week by week, move your tasks forward as long as you finish them, and get an awesome sense of accomplishment. Do the same in your company and see the motivation rise in your team.

The Planning Follow-up

You should do a plan review by the end of each year quarter, or at least the middle of the year, to evaluate your progress and make adjustments.

You will see this process is excellent to increase your self-knowledge and team engagement.

If you get surprised with poor results, don’t feel too bad. Just be honest and take notes on why you could not reach certain goals. Were there unforeseen events?

Or why could you not commit? Will you try again? Just know you are not alone, this is a common process. Projects demand a tone of sacrifice, though. Discipline is part of every successful recipe.

Your Motivation to Succeed

If motivation is lacking, then finding its source for you is another goal… for some people it’s recognition, for others it comes from family or friends.

Others find it in religion, sports or charity. It’s a fact that everyone needs the motivation to make good progress in their projects.

Could projects and goals be motivating by themselves? Yes, when they are strongly linked to your purposes.

Anyway, even when we have noble purposes, we need to be rewarded after sacrifices. So, after overwork, reward yourself with some rest. After helping other people, take care of yourself a little bit.

When beating a small objective, celebrate. Self-rewarding and rewarding your team can make a great difference to make discipline bearable in the project long run.

In your business, you can use gamification to make team members even more motivated, fostering healthy competitiveness.

Break the ice and bring some fun to the work environment with the GitScrum Rock Star Team feature, creating a score and a position for all workers like gamers. They will sure want to win the rock battle.

How about you? Will your 2022 sound like “I Want it All”, or a lullaby?

Dream big and achieve more with GitScrum in 2022!