Are you struggling to make a long term plan? Me too. Or at least I was. I finally came to the conclusion that the 10 year plan isn’t natural, and that makes it hard to use. The gaps between goal periods are too long. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out what can be accomplished in the 5-10 year gap. The plan is also too static, so it gets stale and has to be redone almost from scratch every year.

In my plan, I had such a hard time determining if something should be year 1 or year 5 that I had broken from the pattern and put in a year 2 category. This meant I had 1, 2, 5, and 10. While looking at my columns in Trello, I realized that I could add a 3, move the 10 to 8, and I would have a short Fibonacci sequence.

A Fib-o-what sequence?

In agile software development, we (meaning very smart people before me) discovered that it’s easier to measure the relative complexity of development tasks by using numbers from the Fibonacci sequence. If you’re new to this, the sequence starts with the numbers 1 and 2. After that, the next number is the sum of the previous two numbers. So, it goes 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on.

I thought if the sequence is so good for planning software, maybe I could adapt it to my long term plan. So, I did that and tried to rearrange my goals in that new structure. Not only did it work, it worked really well. And hence, this post.

Start with This Year

So, the first step is to start with what you want to accomplish This Year, or Year 1. Be realistic and know that it’s OK to start the planning after the year has started. Feel free to retroactively add a goal and mark it done. This is the easy column.

Then, look at Next Year

The next number in the sequence is 2. So make a new column and put your goals in it for next year. Be mindful of how much accomplishment you planned on accomplishing this year and be realistic about next year. It’s also good if you have one or two things that start soon, but are realistically year 2 goals. If it helps with the year 2 item to add some intermediate goal to year 1, then do it.

For example, if you wanted to learn electric guitar, it is a realistic goal that you could be at a level where you could play Hot for Teacher within 2 years, but probably not within the first year. In that case, add Hot for Teacher as a year 2 goal and Back in Black as a year 1 goal. If you can’t play Back in Black at the end of year 1, you probably won’t be ready for Hot for Teacher at the end of year 2.

Now for Year 3

Now it’s getting harder, but stick with me. Take the amount of accomplishment that you’ve now established can be done in one year, and add that to year 2 to create your year 3 goals. That’s the key part of the planning process. Add amounts of accomplishment you’ve already established to the last year to make the next year. It’s easy to know if you’re being realistic, because you have history. It’s future history, but you know what I mean. If you thought it would take two years to write a book, don’t put another book in year 3. However, it might be realistic to plan to be halfway done with the next book at year 3.

Rinse and Repeat

Ok, so you know how much can be accomplished in 2 years. And you know your year 3 goals. Add that level of accomplishment to year 3 and you have year 5. Add your year 3 accomplishment level to year 5 and you have year 8. If you really want, you can do that again for year 13. I really wouldn’t recommend going farther than that, but it’s your plan so do whatever works.

Twelve Months Later

Now for the second really good part of the Fibonacci plan. After the first year is over, go back to your plan and make some tweaks for a whole new plan. Rename year 1 to Last Year. Rename year 2 to year 1, year 3 to year 2, and add a new column for year 3. Take what wasn’t finished Last Year and move it to the new year 1. Now that you have an even more realistic view of what can be accomplished in a year, repeat the planning process to shuffle your goals and create new ones. If your book is still a realistic goal for the new year 1, a good goal for the new year 3 would be that second book.