Five Year Plans

Five year plans have a bad reputation from their association with totalitarianism communist regimes, but I have found that five years is a very human amount of time. Five years for a child to grow from birth to school readiness.  Five years to get an undergraduate degree. Five years to get the infamous 10,000 hours of experience (popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers), working 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year.

So it is to five years as a unit of time that I turn to when I am thinking about making a life shift. Recently, I was discussing with my husband, what trajectory we wanted our lives and work to take over the next five years. We rummaged through possibilities – go for a promotion, quit our jobs, get a side gig, move to a remote location and write books, start working on the speaker circuit.

As our conversation grew, a framework also developed.

Next Five Years Framework

We talked about different focuses: self, couple, family, community. We talked about different levels of effort: less, some, more. We talked about different work styles: employee, self-employed, executive, consultant and semi-retired. And then we talked about work type: subject matter expert, manager, product.

I’m sure there are more parameters, but this allowed us to clearly define and discuss where we had been and where each of us wanted to go. What it also gave us was clarity that we did not have a shared focus in the next five years. Not surprising, as raising a family general entails at least one parent having more of a family focus and we have been swapping this role back and forth for the last twenty years.

My Direction

My own direction is not yet completely clear, but my focus is self or community, the effort currently is less, the work style is semi-retired. The work type is not yet clear, and perhaps more parameters are needed. Will I deliver a service? Will I create content? Will I create art? I will certainly take this time for reflection and ensure good alignment between my values and my direction over the next five years.

Often, a direction switch happens to us. We do not consciously choose it. The death of a loved one. The dissolution of a marriage. A worldwide pandemic. Five years later, whether or not we plan, we are that new us, changed, having incorporated the switch as Alberto Rios so eloquently describes in his poem Five Years Later.

But five years after something has happened to us
We are not the anyone.
Who will you be in five years? What is your focus now and what will it be? What predictable changes are coming? Can you plan for other common but unpredictable events? What are your values and how do they guide you in making change? What is your five year plan and how do you decide what direction to move in?

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