Resolutions don't work. This is not a hot take; it's empirical. The University of Scranton's John Norcross has been studying New Year's resolutions for decades and the same finding keeps appearing: by mid-February, about 80% of resolutions have been abandoned. By the end of the year, fewer than 10% are still in force. The drop-off curve is so consistent across populations and decades that it should be regarded as a feature of resolutions, not a bug. The format is what fails — not the people making them.
The reason is structural. A resolution is a wish bolted to an arbitrary calendar date. This year I will exercise more. This year I will read more. This year I will be a better father. Each of these is a value, not a plan. A value is what you care about. A plan is what you will do, specifically, on Tuesday at 7am, to make the value visible in your week. Resolutions confuse the two. They state the value and skip the plan. By February, when no plan has materialised, the value disappears with it.
This post is about the alternative. Annual planning that produces a structure rather than a wish. The framework is called the Annual Blueprint. It takes a Saturday morning in late December or early January. The output is a single document that holds the year together — values at the top, four domains beneath them, twelve quarters of planning underneath that, a year of weeks of executable structure below. It is not magical. It is just planning. But planning that works is, in 2026, increasingly rare, and the rarity is what makes it valuable.
What annual planning actually is
Annual planning, done seriously, has three sequential layers. Each layer feeds the one below it. Skipping a layer breaks the cascade.
Layer one is the values document. Three to five values you have explicitly chosen. Not "things I care about in the abstract" — values you have committed to organising your life around. Health. Craft. Family. Honesty. Solitude. Whatever your version is. The values document should be one page. It is rewritten roughly annually, and it changes slowly — usually one or two values are tweaked or added per year; the rest stay stable. The values document is what every layer below it traces back to.
The Values Architecture (part of the Coaching series) is the formal workbook for this layer. ACT-based, designed for a single sitting once a year. It's the question above all the goal-setting questions.
Layer two is the Annual Blueprint. One document, eight to ten pages, completed in three to four hours. It contains the previous year's debrief (see the post on the four-hour debrief), the central question of the year ahead, three to four domain-level outcomes (the year's headline outputs, one per domain), and the rough shape of the four 90-day cycles that will deliver them.
Layer three is the four quarterly plans. The first one is written now, in December, alongside the Annual Blueprint. The other three are written in March, June, and September. Each quarter has three objectives drawn from the year's domain outcomes. See how to plan a quarter for that framework. The first quarterly plan is the operational entry point — it's what your first Sunday in January will inherit from.
That's the entire structure. Values → Annual Blueprint → first quarterly plan. Three documents, written in one or two sittings, that become the spine of the year. The remaining three quarterly plans are written in their respective quarters, not now. Trying to plan all four quarters in advance is one of the most common mistakes — the world changes too much for the third and fourth quarter plans to survive contact with reality if written in December.
The central question of the year
The single most useful exercise in annual planning is the one that produces the central question. Not a goal. A question. The question you intend to spend the year answering.
Examples from my own debriefs and from other people's:
- "Can I ship something publicly that I'm actually proud of?"
- "Is this career still the right one for me?"
- "What does fatherhood actually require of me at this stage?"
- "Can I sustain this business through another cycle without breaking?"
- "What would I do differently if I were starting from now?"
The central question does several things at once. It gives the year a thematic spine that goals can't. It makes the year's decisions easier — when a choice comes up, you ask which option engages with the central question better. It provides a structure for the year-end debrief — at the end of the year, you have a question whose answer you've spent twelve months developing.
Not every year has a clean central question. Some years are stable enough that the answer is "continue what is working." That's fine — write the question down anyway, and the year proceeds. But often, when you sit with the previous year's debrief for an hour, the question for the year ahead is obvious. The exercise is to give yourself enough quiet time to hear it.
The four-domain spread
Annual planning that works covers four domains, not one. Work, body, capital, relationships. Most people who plan a year heavily over-index on work — five work goals, no health goals, no relationship goals — and discover in October that they have shipped a product but their back has gone, their bank account is in worse shape than last year, and their marriage is being held together by goodwill alone.
The Groundwork framing of the four domains:
- Work / Vocation. The thing you are paid for, the thing you are trying to build, the craft you are trying to deepen. One annual outcome per year here, sometimes two if you have two distinct work threads.
- Body. Physical capacity, sleep, recovery, training. One annual outcome — strength gained, weight lost, condition managed, training milestone reached.
- Capital. Financial position. One annual outcome — savings target, debt eliminated, financial skill acquired, business income milestone.
- Relationships. Family, partnership, friendship, community. One annual outcome — a specific commitment to invest in a specific relationship in a specific way.
Four annual outcomes, one per domain. Not "three goals total." The four-domain spread is what defends against the over-indexing problem. Even in a year heavily focused on a work milestone, there is still one body outcome, one capital outcome, and one relationship outcome. They might be smaller than the work one. They are still there. They get tracked. They get noticed when they're slipping.
The Annual Blueprint — and the OS that runs the whole year
The Annual Blueprint is the 24-page workbook for the annual layer. Previous year's debrief, central question, four-domain outcomes, four quarters mapped, the values document. Standalone £5.99. Inside the Groundwork OS, the Annual Blueprint sits at the top of the cascade. Your quarterly objectives inherit from it. Your weekly intentions inherit from those. Your daily priorities inherit from those. The cascade is live — you can open the Daily Focus Sheet on any Tuesday in October and see, in two clicks, which annual outcome today's first priority is serving. £19.99 for the OS, £54.99 for the complete bundle with every format.
See the Groundwork OS →What to do BEFORE you plan the year
Annual planning fails most often because people plan the year ahead without first doing the debrief of the year behind. They sit down on December 28th, open a notebook, and start writing goals for the new year. The goals are usually a mixture of last year's failures ("this time I will actually exercise") and current aspirations ("this year I will start the side project"). Neither is informed by what actually happened in the year that just ended.
The single highest-leverage discipline in annual planning is to do the debrief first. Four hours, ten questions, one document — see the post on the four-hour debrief for the full framework. The debrief surfaces what worked, what didn't, what unexpectedly emerged, what the central question of the next year actually is. The annual planning that follows is sharper because it inherits from that document.
If you have to choose between doing the debrief and doing the annual plan, do the debrief. You can plan the year in a paper notebook in two hours if you have a strong debrief. You can't plan the year in twenty hours if you haven't processed the previous one.
The sequence · how it actually goes
The full annual planning weekend, done in three sittings:
Saturday morning · the debrief (4 hours). Coffee, notebook, phone in another room. The ten questions from the annual review framework, answered in order, with the year's calendar and bank statement to hand. Output: the debrief document.
Saturday afternoon · the values revisit (1 hour). Read last year's values document. Has anything changed? Is there a value that you've genuinely outgrown, or a new one that needs adding? Most years, one or two adjustments. Output: this year's values document.
Sunday morning · the Annual Blueprint (3 hours). The central question first. Then the four domain outcomes. Then the rough sketch of the four 90-day cycles — what is the headline of each quarter. Then the first quarter, properly: three objectives with key results. Output: the Annual Blueprint document and the Q1 plan.
Total: about eight hours over two days. Once a year. The single highest-leverage time investment in your annual calendar. Most years it produces returns that more than pay for the time within the first quarter.
What not to put in an annual plan
Three things that almost always belong somewhere else, not in the annual plan:
- Daily habits. Habits belong in the quarterly plan or below. A habit takes weeks to embed, not a year, and putting it in the annual plan means you don't actually start it until the year is underway. If you want to build a strength training habit, that is a Q1 objective with weekly intentions, not an annual outcome.
- Specific projects with timelines under three months. Same logic. A project that takes six weeks is a quarterly objective, not an annual outcome. The annual outcome is the larger arc the project contributes to.
- Wishes. "Be happier." "Be a better person." "Be more present." These are values, not outcomes. They belong in the values document, where they are stated as standing commitments. They don't belong as annual goals because they have no testable end state.
The annual plan should contain four domain outcomes, the central question, the sketch of the four quarters, and nothing else. The Q1 plan is more detailed; the values document is shorter; both are separate artefacts. Keeping them separate is what makes the system maintainable.
The honest next step
If you are reading this in late December, this weekend is the right one. Block Saturday and Sunday mornings. Do the debrief first. Then the values. Then the Annual Blueprint. Then the Q1 plan. By Sunday evening, the year ahead has a structure that didn't exist on Friday night, and the first week of January has a defined shape.
The artefacts: Annual Blueprint (£5.99), 90-Day Goal Planner (£3.99), Values Architecture (£5.99) — together about £16 in print. The complete Groundwork bundle at £54.99 includes all of these in every format. The Groundwork OS at £19.99 holds the entire cascade — values, blueprint, quarterly, weekly, daily — in a connected Notion workspace where each layer inherits from the one above.
Or do it in a paper notebook. The framework matters more than the format. What matters is that the year ahead has a structure, the structure traces back to values, and the values trace back to a debrief of the year behind. That is annual planning that works. The rest is resolutions.