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Did you make any career-related resolutions this year? Maybe to find a new job, get a raise, publish an article or present at a conference? 

I’ve written about finding your purpose and defining what success means to you, and about tips and techniques for scheduling your workdays. Last week my colleague Courtney Chandler wrote a great piece about planning your weeks. 

But to achieve big goals, you need a mix of vision and long-term planning. Scheduling, but on the level of weeks, months and years helps you achieve big, overarching goals. 

If you’ve made a goal or a resolution, you’re on your way. You can start to make it a reality by using some planning techniques to get you walking in the right direction.

Backward planning

This strategy works for almost everything. Planning backward doesn’t only help you meet your deadlines, it can also help you make sure you’re planning things that will actually lead you to your goal. Ever do a maze and find it was easier to do it backward than forward? It’s the same idea: you’re less likely to wander down dead ends if you know you’re starting at the goal you want. 

Backward planning means picking a date when you want to have something achieved and then working backward between then and now, figuring out what you need at each time. Here’s an example of backward planning for presenting a poster at a hypothetical conference in October.

1. Think about what you need to do to present at the conference. It’s probably submitting an abstract by the deadline. Say that deadline is in early August. 
2. You need time to write up your data, so submitting by August means your project needs that last key result by July.
3. To get that key result by July, you need time to troubleshoot your imaging protocol and then take and analyze three good sets of microscope images, so you need to start taking and analyzing images by early June. 
4. To start taking microscope images by early June, you need new cell lines, so you need to start making your monoclonals by March.
5. To start making cell lines in March you need to have your DNA, so order the constructs, media, and selection reagents by mid-February. 
6. To order constructs in February you need to design them by next week.

Now you have your steps, and you can schedule individual activities on days and weeks using the skills mentioned here or here. 

You can use this type of planning even if you don’t have a set end date; use it to find out when that date might be. Work backward from date X, same as above including all the steps. Where do you end up? X-minus- two months? X-minus- a year? Maybe it’s sooner than you thought. Then stick to it. 

This works on even longer scales. What do you want your life to be like in years? You can plan this out the same way. 

Exploratory goals 

What if your goal is totally new to you, and you don’t know what the steps are or how long they will take? 

Easy! The solution here is to make your first goal researching what your steps should be. You can dedicate your first month to research and goal planning. 

First, think about what information you need to start planning. Do you need to pick a job first before you can achieve your goal of getting a new job? Then maybe the first thing you need is information about what careers are available to someone with your interests. Put that in your calendar and research careers for the first month. 

Similarly, you might have a specific goal but don't know how to start. Same strategy. Your first goal is researching how to start heading in this direction. Do you need to figure out what conferences are out there? What it takes to publish in a specific journal? Or how people break into the world of consulting? That’s your first goal. Find websites, books and societies. Do informational interviews. Once you have a view of what the path should look like, then you can plan it. 

Tips for goals

While any goal provides direction for your planning, some ways of defining goals are more conducive to effective planning than others. 

Define SMART goals. These aren’t just for school kids to get their homework done. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound goals help you make better progress. For example, “find three people who have this job, and ask them for an informational interview by the end of the month” is a more useful goal than, “learn about the job.”

 The first one is

• specific (three people and asking for an interview)
• measurable (did you ask them for interviews?)
• achievable (people ask for informational interviews all the time; it’s totally doable)
• relevant (this will directly help you learn about the field)
• time-bound (by the end of the month)

“Learn about the job,” on the other hand, is so vague you could just do anything or nothing and convince yourself you were making progress. 

Write down your goals. Don’t just think them. Physically recording goals or making them public has been to help people achieve them. But don’t worry about not wanting to blast your goals all over social media — just writing them down for yourself helps or sharing your plan with one friend or accountability buddy. 

Include your why. Sometimes motivation is hard to find even when you know you want something. If you include a “why” statement that goes along with every goal you write down, you can remind yourself what you are working for on days you’re feeling less get-up-and-go.

“Find three people with this job and ask for informational interviews” can be more meaningful when you’re feeling discouraged about getting no responses to your emails if you add “...because I want to be intentional about my next step and make a more informed decision about whether this is a career I really want.”

Similarly, “Apply to two jobs a day” can be more motivating if you add, “because this job market is tough, but if I’m persistent I can find a job that values my skills and allows me to grow.”