Long-Term Goals: How to Think Beyond the Next 12 Months
There is something very appealing about a year. It has a clear beginning and end, which makes it an easy container for the things we want to do. We make New Year’s resolutions, buy planners, set annual targets and ask ourselves what we’d like to achieve by December. Even outside January, we’re constantly encouraged to think in 12-month blocks: where do you want to be this time next year?
There is nothing wrong with having goals for a year. Twelve months is long enough to make meaningful progress and short enough that we can imagine what life might look like at the other end. The problem comes when we start treating a year as though it’s the natural timeframe for everything we want.
Most of the bigger things in life don’t work that way.
Building financial security might take years. Changing careers can begin with an idea long before you’re in a position to actually make the move. Buying a home, starting a business, writing a book, learning a language, travelling somewhere expensive, changing the way you work or preparing for retirement may take far longer than a single year. Some goals can’t even begin yet because the circumstances aren’t right.
Then there are goals that don’t really have a finish date at all. Having adventure in your life, maintaining close relationships, continuing to learn, looking after your health or being a good friend aren’t things you complete by 31 December and cross off forever.
That’s why I think it’s worth thinking beyond the next 12 months.
Not because you need a detailed ten-year plan. I don’t think most of us do.
But because some of the things that matter most deserve longer than a year to become possible.
Start with the life, not the deadline
Traditional goal-setting advice often begins with a date. Decide what you want, set a deadline and work backwards.
For some goals, that makes perfect sense. If you want to run an event in October, save a certain amount before a holiday or complete a course by a particular date, a deadline gives you something concrete to work towards.
But I think long-term goals often need to begin somewhere else.
Instead of asking, “What can I achieve in the next year?”, try asking, “What would I genuinely like to be part of my life eventually?”
That small change in wording creates much more space.
Perhaps you’d love to work four days a week one day. You might want to live near the coast, become financially independent, spend several months travelling, create something of your own, own an investment property, speak another language or be strong and healthy enough to do a particular trip in your seventies.
You don’t need to know when any of those things will happen before you’re allowed to write them down.
In fact, trying to attach a date too early can sometimes make a perfectly good long-term goal feel unrealistic. If you can’t see how you’re going to achieve it within the next year or two, you may decide not to call it a goal at all.
But a goal doesn’t stop being meaningful simply because it might take ten years.
Think in chapters rather than years
One of the things I’ve come to prefer is thinking about life in chapters rather than calendar years.
A year is fixed. A chapter isn’t.
You might be in a stage of life where your children are young and your time isn’t really your own. You might be building a career, paying a mortgage, caring for parents, recovering financially from something unexpected or simply trying to keep everything going.
That chapter won’t last forever.
There may be things you want that don’t fit particularly well into your life right now but could make complete sense in the next one.
Perhaps you’d love to travel extensively, but school-aged children make that difficult. Maybe you want to retrain, but this isn’t the moment to give up a secure income. Perhaps you’d love to start a business but currently have neither the time nor the financial breathing room.
Writing those goals down doesn’t mean you have to force them into the current chapter.
It simply means you haven’t forgotten them.
I think that’s particularly important because “not now” can very easily turn into “never thought about it again”. Life fills the space. Five years pass surprisingly quickly, and the idea that once mattered quietly disappears underneath everything more immediate.
Long-term thinking gives those ideas somewhere to wait.
A long-term goal can still influence what you do today
One of the interesting things about writing down a goal that may be years away is that it can begin changing your decisions long before you’re actively pursuing it.
If you know you’d eventually like to work fewer days, you might start thinking differently about your finances now. Perhaps you begin paying down debt, increasing your superannuation, investing or simply becoming more conscious of the lifestyle costs that keep you dependent on a particular income.
If you’d love to spend three months travelling through Europe one day, you might start putting a small amount into a travel account even though the trip itself is years away.
If you’re interested in changing careers, perhaps you begin reading, taking a short course or talking to people who already work in that area. None of those things commits you to leaving your job. They simply keep the possibility moving.
A long-term goal can act as a direction without becoming an immediate project.
I think that’s an important distinction because not everything we want needs to be actively worked on at the same time. Trying to do that would be exhausting.
Sometimes it’s enough to know which direction you’re facing.
Some goals need time because they are expensive
Money is an obvious reason certain goals take longer than we’d like.
A deposit for a home, an extended trip, starting a business, reducing work, helping children financially or preparing for retirement may require years of planning.
That doesn’t make them less exciting goals. It simply means the financial part needs to be acknowledged.
Instead of asking, Can I afford this now?, a long-term perspective allows you to ask, What would need to happen for this to become affordable later?
Those are very different questions.
The first can shut a dream down immediately. The second creates possibilities.
Maybe the answer is saving regularly. Perhaps it’s earning more, spending differently, investing, waiting until another expense ends or changing the scale of the original idea.
The goal itself might also evolve as you learn more.
You might start with the dream of buying a holiday house and eventually realise what you really want is the freedom to spend a month somewhere beautiful every year without owning it.
Sometimes thinking long term gives us enough time to discover what we’re actually trying to achieve.
Some goals need time because life has other priorities
Not every delay needs fixing.
This is something I think conventional goal-setting advice sometimes misses.
There are stages when something else genuinely needs to come first.
You may have young children. A demanding job. Ageing parents. Financial commitments. Health issues in the family. A partner whose career currently needs more flexibility than yours.
A goal can matter to you without being the priority right now.
I think we can be unnecessarily hard on ourselves about this. We see something we’ve wanted for several years and wonder why we still haven’t done it, as though the only possible explanation is procrastination or lack of discipline.
Sometimes the explanation is simply life.
There is a difference between repeatedly avoiding something that matters and consciously deciding that its time hasn’t come yet.
Long-term goals allow for seasons when maintaining what you already have is enough.
Break the goal down without shrinking the dream
Once a long-term goal begins to feel more relevant, it helps to work backwards from it, but I wouldn’t start by turning the entire thing into a giant list of tasks.
Instead, ask what the next stage looks like.
If your goal is to spend six months travelling after your children finish school, perhaps the current stage is simply financial preparation.
If you’d like to change careers in five years, this year might be about exploring what else interests you.
If you want to write a book, perhaps the first stage is finding out whether you actually enjoy writing regularly.
If you want to become much fitter for an experience you hope to have in three years, the first goal might simply be finding a form of exercise you can realistically continue.
Breaking a long-term goal into stages makes it less overwhelming without forcing you to reduce the ambition of the original idea.
You don’t need to see every step from here to the finish.
You need to see enough to begin.
Your timeline is allowed to move
This might be one of the most important things about long-term goals.
The date you first imagine is not a promise.
You might think something will take three years and discover it takes seven. You might expect a goal to take ten years and suddenly an opportunity appears that makes it possible in two.
Life will interfere with your timeline because life is happening at the same time as your goals.
Finances change. Relationships change. Work changes. Priorities change. Opportunities arrive. Things go wrong.
That’s not evidence that the goal-setting process has failed.
It is simply the reality of trying to plan a future you cannot completely predict.
I think dates are useful when they help us move. They become less useful when they turn into a reason to feel behind.
If a goal still matters, change the timeline.
If it doesn’t matter anymore, change the goal.
You don’t owe an old date on a page anything.
Revisit the goal, not just the progress
When we review goals, the usual question is: How much progress have I made?
With a long-term goal, I think there is another question that matters just as much:
Do I still want this?
A lot can happen in five years.
Perhaps the career you once wanted no longer appeals to you. Maybe the city you dreamed of living in doesn’t suit the life you want now. Perhaps the financial goal is still important but the reason behind it has changed.
Or maybe you come back to something you wrote years ago and realise you want it more than ever.
That’s useful information too.
Revisiting a long-term goal isn’t about holding yourself accountable to an earlier version of yourself. It’s about keeping the conversation going.
Why did I want this?
What part of it still matters?
Has the goal changed?
Is it becoming more possible?
Is there something I could do now?
Or am I ready to let it go?
This is one of the reasons I wanted A Life in Goals to have space for returning to what you’ve written rather than simply ticking things off. A goal that takes years deserves more than one conversation.
Keep goals that aren’t ready yet
There may be things on your long-term goals list that you do absolutely nothing about for several years.
I think that’s okay.
You don’t need to create an action plan for every dream.
You don’t need twenty active goals.
And you certainly don’t need to feel guilty every time you open your journal and see something you haven’t started.
Some goals can simply remain possibilities.
Their value may be that they remind you there are still things you’d like to experience. They give you somewhere to look beyond the current busy chapter. They keep a door open.
And sometimes, years later, the circumstances suddenly change.
The children get older. The mortgage gets smaller. Your work becomes more flexible. You meet somebody who gives you an idea. You have more money, more confidence or simply more willingness to try.
The goal that wasn’t ready suddenly is.
If you’d thrown it away because it couldn’t happen within 12 months, you might have forgotten it altogether.
Long-term goals don’t need to be enormous
There is another misconception worth letting go of: that a long-term goal has to be something huge.
It doesn’t.
Perhaps you’d like to become someone who reads regularly again. You want to gradually create a garden. You’d like to visit a different part of Australia every year. Maybe you want to learn enough Italian that, one day, you can comfortably have a conversation.
The timeframe doesn’t determine the importance of a goal.
Some things take years simply because they happen slowly.
A friendship deepens over time. Financial security builds gradually. A home evolves. A skill develops. Confidence grows.
There may never be a dramatic moment when you declare the goal achieved.
You simply look back one day and realise something has changed.
What might you want beyond next year?
If you’re used to thinking about goals annually, try giving yourself permission to look further ahead without turning it into a formal ten-year plan.
Ask yourself what you might love to have done, experienced, changed, learned or created over the next five, ten or twenty years.
Where might you like to go?
How would you like work to fit into your life?
What would you like financially?
What do you want your relationships to feel like?
Is there something you’d love to become good at?
What kind of home would suit the person you’re becoming?
What would you like your health to allow you to do?
What have you been calling “one day” for far too long?
You don’t need to know exactly when any of it will happen.
You don’t even need to know whether all of it will happen.
The point is simply to lift your eyes beyond the end of the year for a moment and see what else might be there.
Life doesn’t happen in 12-month blocks
That’s really the thinking behind A Life in Goals.
I didn’t want to create another book that begins in January and expires in December, because the things we want from our lives rarely behave that neatly.
Some goals will happen this year.
Some will take five years.
Some will change beyond recognition before they happen, and others will quietly disappear because we become someone who wants something different.
There will also be things you can’t possibly write down yet because you haven’t imagined them.
That’s the exciting part.
Long-term goal setting isn’t about predicting your future and then making sure you stick to the plan.
It’s about giving yourself permission to think beyond what’s immediately in front of you.
To keep the ideas that aren’t ready.
To start moving towards the ones that are.
To change direction when you need to.
And to remember that just because something can’t happen this year doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong in the life you’re still creating.