When I was a teenager, my father decided we would build a A-Frame cabin on the lake. Over the next few years, I spent some mostly wonderful times heading up to a lake house every weekend morning. When we were not building, we were planning and preparing to build. One thing I learned as we went along, you cannot create something big without a plan. The better we planned, the easier the job was once we got down to doing the actual building. Photo courtesy of Flickr/Creative Commons/Greg.Buri [/featured-image]This lake house lesson is one I have tried to apply to everything I do in life. Sadly, I have failed too often. While I have accomplished much, I find that most things I wandered into by accident. As I have looked back over the last year or two in my annual review, a lack of planning and acting on the plans has become painfully clear. I have now taken some serious time to explore and learn from others (and my own successes and mistakes) what really works. Click to Listen*NOTE: If you are reading this in email, you will need to go to Itunes or my blog to get access to this show.Topic of the Week: Setting Goals for Next YearOver a period of four days I have taken the time to do some serious planning. Here is the process I am completing today. In case you have not started, I explain the "getting-started" process as defined in these two previous episodes.Episode 35: Planning for Next Year | The Best Year EverEpisode 37: Debriefing: Five Key Questions to Plan for Next YearNext I go through a process to help me develop clarity. Michael Nichols in my mastermind group said the other day something like..."If you are not getting the results you want, you need to get more specific on what you are trying to achieve."Michael said it a few times and it hit me like a load of bricks each time. Lack of specifics is one of my big problems. In my experience with coaching others, lack of specific  goals is the biggest obstacle to success. We often have no idea what we want or we are fuzzy in the view of what success looks like. The following process I have used to remove the fuzziness. 1. Who? Start by making a list of those people who depend on you. What does each person or group need from you the most? Stephen Covey called this defining your roles. Do not forget to include how you depend on yourself.2. Organize ideas into stacks. From here take those key roles and make a stack for each. Take all those other things you need to do and ideas from each role and put them into the appropriate stack. For instance, my stack of family includes things I have to do around the house to keep things running and functional. I printed out my many notes in Evernote related to house projects. All of them went into the FAMILY stack.3. Write goals. Next, take a clean sheet of paper and write out goals as you look through these stacks. I tried to include everything I cared about and did not worry about the number of goals. I ended up with over 20 goals. Too many to really deal with, but at least everything was included.4. Plan for 90 day sprints. I have been impressed (change that to convicted) by Jonathan Milligan and Michael Nichols that using a 90 day planning cycle is better than a one year cycle. Too much happens over a year. Having 90 days keeps the pressure on in a way that pushes you to get real results. (This is pretty much the formula that I used to get my PhD.) My 90 day sprints fall in these periods. While not all perfectly 90 days, close enough.January 1 - March 31April 1 - June 30July 1 - September 30October 1 - December 315. Decide which are most critical. Now that I had all these goals listed (over 20 in my case), I needed to get serious. For me, I needed to get that list of 20 down to about 5. To shrink a list, you have to prioritize. I needed to look over my list and decide which goals mattered most, and move them to the top. For instance,