Meet your annual goals with consistent quarterly and monthly check-ins

How are those annual goals going? If you're anything like me, you love planning but don't love all the work it takes to put it down on paper. But for an annual plan to be successful, you need some good check-ins along the way to keep you—and your goals—on track. Here's how I do it.

Build quarterly benchmarks into your annual plan

It's going to be a pain to try to measure how you're doing with your goals if you haven't already set up a system to track progress. Every time you make a goal, you want to have a clear idea of how to achieve it from start to finish and what progress looks like.

Assuming you've already started working toward your goals, going back and adding in more details and setting benchmarks is a great way to ensure you meet them. Personally, I like the SMART approach to creating goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound.

I tend to do all my annual planning in January each year. I have templates for reviews and reflections, and my annual goals match the priorities I've identified in my annual review. Here's how I break them down:

• Goal: I name the goal, being as specific as possible, and give myself a timeframe, usually by end of year, during a certain quarter, or from X to Y quarter (Specific, Achievable, and Timebound).

• Why/Results: I share why this goal is important to my business/career and what exactly I want to achieve within the timeframe I've set (Relevant and Measurable).

• How/By: This section is usually a free write of ideas for how to meet my goal and/or the steps to get there, which also helps me ultimately decide if I'm taking on too much work (Specific and Achievable).

Now let's look at an example:

If you want to get better at planning and meeting your goals, just remember that it's an ongoing process. Sometimes, I know exactly what I want to achieve in my head and am too excited to get it down on paper. Having a system like the SMART approach forces me to look at my goals more objectively and set better parameters.

Create your quarterly benchmark

Now that you know what info you need from your goals, you can identify that quarterly benchmark. My ideal result for my blogging goal is 18 blog posts and 9 newsletters, or 27 posts total from April through December. 

Breaking that down into quarters, that means in Q2, Q3, and Q4, I'd want to publish 9 posts total per quarter. That's a clear quarterly benchmark that's easily measured and tracked and will help me achieve my overall goal.

What about goals that are less easy to track?

Another goal of mine is to generate 50% of my freelance income this year from Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion (DEAI)-related work. Since I freelance on top of a full-time job and my freelance income goals are fairly low this year, this is achievable for me. But how would I create quarterly benchmarks for this?

First, I could break this goal down into quarterly steps, e.g., "By Q2, I will have earned X amount in DEAI work". I could also assign this goal to one or more quarters, e.g., "In Q2 and Q3 I will pursue only DEAI projects totaling Y amount." There are a lot of different ways to benchmark your goals, and you may have to experiment a bit to figure out what works best for you.

Tip: Don't stop at quarterly progress! To really stay on track, you'll want to break down each goal even further into monthly actions.

Going back to my blog content writing goal, let's look at the list of actions I've suggested for myself:

• Create a quarterly content plan 

• Schedule in writing time

• Find other writers to collab for guest posts

• Create a blog post template

• Keep a running list of article ideas that come up as I write

Now I can take these to-dos, fill any gaps, prioritize them, and assign those tasks to myself. I have health issues on top of a full-time job, so I prefer to keep things more flexible by assigning monthly actions weekly based on my energy and schedule.

Set monthly and quarterly check-ins

Every good business reviews and plans regularly, and individual workers should be no different. Set regular planning time in your calendar to look over the past month and quarter and see how you did.

This check-in should cover goals, but also just how each month and quarter went. Why is this important? Because when you evaluate goals and review your results (more on that later), this will give you the context to say "Yes, this worked" or "No, it didn't."

I've been struggling with depression a lot recently, so much so that I've had to revisit some of my annual goals. One that's no longer working for me right now is that blog content goal. I plan to keep writing, but the 27 posts I was hoping for are no longer as realistic.

Tip: Make reviews and planning even easier on yourself by combining your monthly and quarterly check-ins. 

I try to set aside time each month for reviews and planning, usually during the last or first week of the month. I use the same template for monthly reviews and planning and quarterly reviews, both because it's convenient and because all the data is there. Essentially, my monthly and quarterly reviews are the same thing, with a few end-of-quarter reflection questions tacked on. Feel free to check out my template and try it for yourself.

My monthly/quarterly review includes:

• A summary of what happened each month

• Project notes

• My systems

• What I did or didn't do well

• Ideal work situation and how I'm working toward that

More recently, I've added a review question for my goals to track my progress as well. At the end of each quarter, I do a wrap-up that includes highlights, lowlights, goals, systems, and final reflections. 

Now, keep in mind that this exercise isn't really numbers-based. For example, I also have a separate spreadsheet that helps me keep track of my income, clients, assignments, and project types for each quarter.

Here are some other templates to try—and to adapt to your own needs.

• Quarterly review by Alston Barretto

• Hypercontext's quarterly planning meeting agenda

• Notion review and planning templates

Re-evaluate your goals regularly

Times and needs change, and so will your goals. Just be careful about letting them shift in the wrong direction.

2023 was a bad planning year for me. I started by setting reasonable income and business goals for the year. Then, after landing a big project at the beginning of the year, I found myself writing over my goals, making them bigger and bigger to match my new priorities. Unfortunately, I was way too ambitious, and after some serious burnout and a lot of personal stuff took over, I ended up backing off of business planning completely. 

There's nothing wrong with switching things up to match your circumstances, but be cautious. It's very easy to get excited and overly ambitious, and then lose motivation if your situation changes again.

When you do your quarterly review and planning, take a hard look at each of your goals:

• How do you feel about the goal itself and the time you have to accomplish it? Would you change anything? (Specific, Timebound)

• What about the results you want? How much progress have you made and how much is there left to do? Can you still reasonably accomplish them in the time you have left? (Achievable, Measurable, Timebound)

• Check your "why." Does it still hold true? Does it still fit your personal direction, or has it shifted? (Relevant)

• Look back at your notes from the last quarter. Is trying to achieve your goals negatively affecting your life in other ways?

Review your results

This is something a lot of us forget. It's easy to keep going with goals because they're there and you still want to meet them. But are they actually producing results? After all, we set goals to accomplish something. If you aren't getting the right—or any—results from the goals you've set, check if that goal is ultimately serving you or not.

What you consider to be a result will really depend on you. It could be quantitative or qualitative.

Quantitative results have numbers attached: you gained X more clients, saved Y amount of time, or earned $ more. Qualitative results are more descriptive and subjective, so they'll depend on what you prioritize. For example, if a goal results in better health or less stress, that's a qualitative result. 

And yes, you could break down qualitative results like "less stress" into numbers as well (number of days you felt stressed before compared to now, for example). But it's also ok to keep things simple!

A better project management system for me could result in quantitative results like better data for tracking my projects (e.g., X number of projects at Y rate completed in Z amount of time) that I can then use to set better goals next time. It could also reduce stress and simplify my limited freelance hours, both qualitative results.

Don't forget that you may have already built a "why" or "ideal result" into your goal, so revisit that as well and see how close you've gotten.

Tip: It's ok to not meet your goals! Part of re-evaluating is deciding whether this is the right time to meet that goal. If you need to postpone, change, or drop it, that's an option.

It's also important to note down when you're struggling to meet a goal: this is often a clue that something needs to change. It could be the goal itself, or something external that needs adjusting to get you back on track. For example, maybe you find you're too stressed about money to focus on a passion project.

In my case, expanding my blog is important, but my health needs to take priority, which means my goals need to shift. I can't control the health factors, but I can acknowledge the impact and reprioritize so I can focus on managing them better.

Think of goals as guidelines

By breaking down your goals, working toward them incrementally, and reviewing them consistently, you can make informed decisions and pivot when (not if) something changes.

Related reading:

• When to give up on a goal—and how to do it

• Eat the frog: A practical approach to reaching your goals

• Set annual goals with this simple goal-setting worksheet