Working notes: 2026
Four generic goal categories, one review cadence each, except the one with no calendar entry at all.
Every year I rewrite one document: a single page listing what has to be true across career, money, and home life by December, plus the infrastructure underneath all three. The organizing idea is that a milestone in one column should leave behind something reusable in another — a technical artifact that also reads as evidence, a habit that protects both time and budget. That's the theory. The plan itself quietly admits it doesn't hold evenly.
The tell is in the last section, the one most planning documents skip: who actually checks on this, and how often. Career gets a fixed two-week sync. Money gets a weekly script and a monthly pass. The infrastructure underneath — hardware, the knowledge system it all runs on — gets a quarterly review. Home life gets written down in the same document and then nothing. No cadence, no calendar entry, no second party expecting an update.
Ring fill is review frequency, not completion — select a category to see how often it actually gets checked.
That's not an oversight so much as a structural fact about which goals have external pressure attached. The two-week sync exists because someone else is waiting on the other end of it. The weekly script exists because drift there costs real money if it goes unchecked. The category with no cadence is the one where the only person keeping score is me, and I'm bad at scoring myself on a fixed schedule — I have to build the schedule in from outside, or it doesn't happen.
So the fix isn't a better goal. It's giving the neglected category the same thing the others already have: a date, on a calendar, that isn't contingent on how busy the other three columns get. A quarterly review that already exists for the systems underneath everything else is the cheapest place to bolt this on — the meeting is already scheduled; it just needs one more item on the agenda.
A goal with no scheduled check isn't a priority. It's a wish with better formatting.