Writing prompts to help you plan 2025

I plot my whole year in the five days between Christmas and New Year. Here's how.

This is my last newsletter of 2024. Which feels premature, honestly, but I’ve always been someone who prefers to leave the party a touch too early; a surreptitious thanks to the host before French-exiting out the back door.

I made another handbrake turn this week, content-wise. I blame my frazzled pre-Christmas brain. I had written a long essay on learning to take myself seriously as a writer – which I will likely publish here at some point – but then realised that the only thing anyone should be taking seriously right now is remembering where you stored last December’s festive knitwear.

Instead, I wanted to write a shorter piece dedicated to one of my favourite times of the year: Twixmas, the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. By this point of the year, my inner extrovert has been exhausted, and I’m ready to hide away for a couple of days.

A few years ago, I decided to use this time to plot my next moves for the year ahead. Although that might sound like work, it’s actually a process I really look forward to: reflecting, dreaming, letting my imagination go wild. It’s become an annual ritual for me, myself and I. And so I thought, why not write about it here, before I sign off until 2025?

I’d also love to hear of anyone else’s year-planning rituals in the comments. I’m always looking for ideas to shake up my routine. While this works better (in my experience) as a private process, I never would have started it if not for inspiration from others.

To set the scene, my planning process takes place over series of daily meetings with myself at a local cafe, with a notebook, an oat cappuccino and cake. In addition to my writing materials, I take a couple of pieces of colourful A3 card to write my goals out in bold capital letters (that’s a trick to make me quite literally ‘think big’, rather than scribbling everything down in tiny, self-conscious handwriting).

Format-wise, I closely channel an exercise called the Year Compass, which you can download for free here. This is an 'anti' New Year’s Resolutions exercise that starts with reflecting on the past year in order to help with the second stage: planning the new one.

Having done the Year Compass a couple of times since it was first introduced to me by London Writers’ Salon during lockdown, I’m familiar enough with the basics to make it my own. This year, I’ll be free-styling my reflections and plotting, while sticking to a similar tried-and-tested structure. Which is:

1. Reflect on the year before (through a written Q&A)

2. Plan for the year ahead (through a written Q&A)

3. Map out my future plans in a 3 x 2 grid on a piece of A3, with each box dedicated to an area of my life: e.g. ‘CAREER’, ‘RELATIONSHIPS’ (for me this means relationships of all kinds), ‘WELLNESS’, ‘MEANING’, ‘HOME’, ‘REST’.

These labels can be switched up depending on what you want to focus on e.g. community, finances, parenting, etc.

Here are some of the questions I’ll be asking myself in the 1) and 2) stages. Feel free to steal some of these, or, again, share some of your own below.

Questions I’ll be asking myself over Twixmas

Relationships

• What type(s) of relationships do I want to focus on this year (family, friendship, romantic)?

• Who do I want to see more of?

• What relationship skill do I want to get better at (e.g. being a better listener, hosting meals or remembering birthdays) – and what are 2-3 ways I can do that?

Home

• What was the best home improvement this year (I already know this: painting the inside of my front door yellow!)

• How do I want to feel in my home this year?

• What is broken that needs fixing?

Health (physical and mental)

• What had the biggest impact on my i. physical and ii. mental health last year?

• What do I want my exercise regime to look like in 2025?

• What do I want to cut out, or do less of, in 2025?

Meaning

• What brought me meaning last year?

• What daily habit could bring me more meaning this year?

• What am I curious to learn about this year?

• What travel plans could bring me meaning in 2025, and why?

• What meaningful activities do I want to do more of?

Career

• What were the highs and lows last year?

• What project(s) did I regret saying yes to?

• What’s my overall professional focus this year? (Last year it was ‘improving my writing craft’)

• What are my earning goals for this year?

• What three things do I want to accomplish?

• What’s my one-word intention for the year ahead?

Rest (this one is new for 2024/2025 – as I’m not very good at it!)

• When did I feel most relaxed this year?

• How do I integrate more of this into 2025 (daily, weekly, monthly practices)

I hope you find these helpful! I’ve also found several books to be useful inspiration for this process.

3 books that help me plan my life

📚Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman convinced me of the necessity of narrowing down one’s goals.

📚 Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans was where I first encountered the idea of life-design, i.e. plotting your life through design thinking.

📚 Manifest by Roxie Nafousi taught me the power of visual as well as written planning (my goals for 2024 were all displayed on my desk at home, and it held me accountable in a way I wouldn’t be if they were scribbled down somewhere).

The cutest Christmas bao puns; festive raclette with my coworking friends; a lunchtime game of darts; spicy beef soup to fend off winter colds; a baby-shower outfit complete with Minnie Mouse bow; and a Christmas meet-up I hosted for fellow journalists.

That’s all from me – merry Christmas and have a wonderful new year!

Francesca x