Working notes: 2026
Four generic goal categories, one review cadence each, except the one with no calendar entry at all.
Every year I rewrite one document: a single page listing what has to be true across career, money, and home life by December, plus the infrastructure underneath all three. The organizing idea is that a milestone in one column should leave something reusable in another. That's the theory. The plan quietly admits it doesn't hold evenly. The tell is in the section most planning documents skip: who actually checks on this, and how often. Career gets a fixed two-week sync, because someone else is waiting on the other end of it. Money gets a weekly script pruning drifted spend and a monthly pass against the plan, because drift there costs real money unchecked. The infrastructure underneath everything — hardware, the knowledge system — gets a quarterly review. Home life gets written down in the same document and then nothing: no cadence, no calendar entry, no second party expecting an update. That's a structural fact about which goals have external pressure attached, not an oversight. The category with no cadence is the one where I'm the only one keeping score, and I'm bad at scoring myself on a schedule I have to build in from outside. The fix isn't a better goal. It's giving the neglected category what the others already have — a date on a calendar not contingent on how busy the other three columns get, bolted onto the quarterly review that already exists. A goal with no scheduled check isn't a priority. It's a wish with better formatting.