8,760 hours how to get the most out of next year - Alex Vermeer

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This is a guide for planning the next 8,760 hours—one full year—of your life. More importantly, it is about creating a detailed plan and optimizing for success, based on an understanding of what works.

For the last few years this system has worked very well for me. My hope is that you will find it useful as well. Many of the ideas here are not original to me. This guide builds off many hours of reading many articles and blogs about productivity, goals, and the brain, which are attributed when possible. 1 The end result is a system for keeping yourself constantly moving towards your goals over the next year, and constantly staying on track.

Why plan at all? Want to learn an instrument? Want to write a book? Want to beat every computer game ever designed? Want to cure cancer? Want to have a positive impact on the world and an impactful career? Do you have something to protect, something that gets you out of bed in the morning? Whatever your primary motivations are in life, you won’t get anywhere by waiting for something to happen. We plan because we have sh*t we want to do with our lives. Humans do not think strategically by default. Even when we know what our goals are—and we often don’t—we are still bad at asking things like:

➙ ➙ What exactly do I want to achieve?

➙ ➙ How will I measure success?

➙ ➙ Am I actively seeking out information about this?

➙ ➙ Can I break this down into more manageable parts?

➙ ➙ Is this really my goal? Am I constrained by fears or uncertainties?

Our brains are not optimized for achieving our larger goals in life. They are sculpted by evolution for survival and reproductive abilities, but not much else! We need systems and processes in place to help us get around these evolutionary “abilities” so that we can get the most out of our lives.

Your life in a nutshell (“life is short”) If you live to be 80 years old, which is about the first-world average life expectancy, then you will experience about 30,000 days or 700,000 hours of life (if we take out sleeping time the number drops to more like 450,000 hours).

The point is that we have limited time and we must choose how to spend it. Unfortunately, from personal experience, I rarely take the time to consciously do this. The only way to decide what to work on is to prioritize. That’s why I take a big picture approach to life and break down the big picture into present year and day actions.

This is part of my motivation for calling this guide “8,760 hours” rather than “one year.” Even if there is a sense that life is incredibly short, there are still 8,760 hours in a single year! That is a lot of time to get some real stuff done.

Given that our natural life-planning skills are... lacking, this guide hopes to help us overcome that limitation and get things done anyway.