Introducing The 5,000 Hour Plan

Results from 2024 and Lessons Learned

Below this section is my original post from last year, where I first published the 5,000 Hour Plan framework. Since I love to practice things and not just put theories out there, I actually used the 5,000 Hour Plan as described below and here are the results:

Much more efficient use of my time overall. I tracked 4,100 hours of activity using Google Sheets, all allocated based on my priorities. This was a forcing function for me to think through every action. While I tried doing this daily, as the year went on I realized that weekly updates were totally fine, even monthly works. And through this discipline my mentality changed from, “what am I going to do with my time?” to, “I am 100% sure this is the top priority today.”
Quicker course corrections: I also saw red flags in meeting my objectives throughout the year, which allowed me to course correct and reallocate time in certain areas, to better feed areas that were in need.
5,000 Hours is an aspiration. Considering that I only accounted for 4,100 hours, I didn’t accurately predict my available time. The truth is, 5,000 hours is an aspiration. It’s not totally unrealistic, but it’s very, very challenging. Next year, I hope to increase this to 4,250 hours of time tracking.
Reduced # of Key Results in future planning. As I enter 2025, my new 2025 5,000 Hour Plan is much more refined. I kept 5 buckets, but I reduced the number of Key Results in each bucket by about 50%. I realized that in 2024 I had too much sub-KR’s to track, and ended up reducing this in half because it helps me focus more.
More distributed % allocations in future planning. My overall objectives are still a total of five. However, my distribution of time across those five is much more distributed. This means that I will enter the year with a new mindset and I’m challenging myself to enter into new terrain by leaving my previous priorities.
Mission and Vision is a living and breathing statement. Another realization is that our Life Mission and Vision constantly needs evaluation. I updated my Mission and Vision to be more in line with what I “stand for”, getting closer to my purpose and living a more fulfilled life overall. We aren’t robots – we need to be more integrated across the key areas of life.

Original Post Below

5,000 hours. That’s all you’re getting in 2024. 5,000 waking hours. What will you do with the time that is given to you? I’m introducing the 5,000 Hour Plan to help you answer that question.

Find me on LinkedIn and DM me for a copy of the template.

What do I mean by 5,000 hours? It’s not rocket science. For 16 hours a day you’re awake getting things done, right? Well, some of you (like Elon Musk) may have some more than that, but 16 hours is the average assuming 8 hours of sleep per night. Multiply 16 by 365 days, and you get 5,840 hours. Subtract 840 hours for what I call “human error” or just days where you are sick, or other things in life come up. We have to account for human error in our calculations to be realistic. So my realistic assessment of how much awake, productive time we have in a year is 5,000 hours. And as Gandalf says, “All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”

A New Design for our Time is Needed

This plan is meant to begin thinking through your life on a more “time-aware” level rather than just living to work. If you’re a workaholic, this plan is not for you. Sure, you can still use this, and allocate all of your time to a startup, but you must know that you are deciding to give up on friends, family and hobbies. For us mere mortals, the odds are that “work” will only represent about ~40% of that 5,000 hours. That leaves 60% of your awake time that most people neglect to fill with meaningful, mission-driven activities that can improve the world around us. Instead, we often resort to wasting time by doom-scrolling, watching TV, shopping, whatever. You get the point. Without specific goals, we’ll become more likely to waste our life away.

Why is allocating our time across more than just “work” necessary? Just look at the data. There are studies that show Americans are now at our most “checked-out” point than at any other point studied. For example, this Wall Street Journal story discusses the question: “Why Are Employees So Unhappy at Work Right Now?” which is a good watch to understand the issue happening across today’s workplace. A 2023 Gallup poll found that Americans, even with better pay and benefits, are growing increasingly checked out in the workplace. With so many workers frustrated and disengaged at work, I propose that a new approach to thinking about our time is needed.

Creating Your 5,000 Hour Plan

The 5,000 Hour Plan is something I personally use, and I’m now sharing it with you because I want to fulfill my personal mission, which is, “to create order and peace from chaos and confusion.” This is an area that I’m personally invested in. How does it work? It’s about taking 5 steps to arrive at an allocation across your 5,000 hours.

Find me on LinkedIn and DM me for the plan template.

In five quick steps, I think you can have a printable plan sitting on your desk. These are the steps:

Step 1: Create Life Mission and Vision Statements
Step 2: List Your Top 5 Objectives for the Year
Step 3: Allocate Your 5,000 Hours
Step 4: Set your Key Results (the actions you’ll take)
Step 5: Add Your 5,000 Hour Plan into a Tracker

Step 1: Create Life Mission and Vision Statements

And before you start diving in too deep, the best way to start this exercise is with setting up your life’s mission and vision statements. This is not an easy thing to do, so take some deep quiet time to really construct what you feel your life’s mission is, and then what vision do you hope to realize through that mission? The 5,000 hour plan is meant to have a balanced life, built around a mission and vision that you develop.

If you don’t have a mission or vision, that’s ok, it’s never too late to start. The way you do this is by thinking about your unique gifts, combined with what you have the most energy around, and driven toward an actual area that you can influence in your remaining years. So, that might sound like:

Mission: “To create a clean environment that future generations can enjoy.”

Vision: “A world that is clean, functional, and livable for everyone.”

Step 2: List Your Top 5 Objectives for the Year

After finalizing Step 1, you can divide up your core objectives across five areas that align to this mission, without neglecting your personal life in the process. This is a mistake many people make when planning annual goals. We forget to account for things we actually enjoy, and become robot-like workaholics when developing our OKRs. So a balanced view might look like:

Be the best employee of CleanUp Inc. that I can be
Become financially independent and pay off all loans
Improve my physical, emotional and mental health
Create art that inspires others
Have more fun and see the world

See how this works? Just because my mission is to “create a clean environment” doesn’t mean that I should neglect my financial, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual goals. All of these might account for less time than what you really focus on at work all day, but still, work is only going to be a portion of the total 5,000 hours. What will you do with the rest of your time, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? This is where the mission meets sub-tasks or actions to meet your goals. This is done by spreading out your objectives across 5 buckets. And each objective only receives a percentage of your allotted 5,000 hours.

Access the 5,000 Hour Plan Template for Free

(You can click File > Make a Copy using Google Draw to start your plan)

Step 3: Allocate Your 5,000 Hours

The next step is to allocate your 5,000 hours across your objectives. As an example, if you work 40 hours a week in a typical job, accounting for PTO and holidays you will need to allocate 2,000 hours for this job, or 40%. And you can spread some of the things you do in that job to other objectives, for example if your company gives you an opportunity to take walks during lunch, or hit the gym, or volunteer, etc. So let’s just round this down to 35% around supporting your company’s mission. Then, your other objectives might have similar logic for the time you can spend on those objectives.

This might look like:

Objective 1: 35%
Objective 2: 28%
Objective 3: 21%
Objective 4: 09%
Objective 5: 07%

Step 4: Set your Key Results (the actions you’ll take)

Now you can start to set realistic key results, or actions/tasks, in support of each objective. This will look like this:

Be the best employee of CleanUp Inc. that I can be (35%)
1. Complete Project XYZ by March 31st.
2. Publish 1 new article on our blog each month.
3. Get certified in Community Clean Ups by April 15th.
4. Grow my team from 5-7 employees by July 31st.

And repeat this across all 5 Objectives that you set out earlier. This can be as granular as you want it to be, but I recommend keeping it to no more than 10 so that you can track progress and keep it simple. Also, I recommend keeping each to 5-10 words each and try to associate a date and measure them where you can. This will be important because the final step of this process is going to be tracking.

Step 5: Add Your 5,000 Hour Plan into a Tracker

Now that you designed your 5,000 hour plan, it’s time to make it real. Starting on January 1st, you are already dipping into your 5,000 hours, so it’s good to hit the ground running. And you can use your calendar, task manager, or whatever tool you track your activities in, to insert your new OKRs across the five areas, and use tasks and sub-tasks to get organized.

I personally use Google Tasks because it’s just easier for me. This way I can open the Tasks app, and see which task is due that day, week or month and begin rearranging as necessary. The added benefit is that I can also use Tasks for work tasks, so I can track everything in one location. Others might use Asana, Jira, pen and pad, Excel, Sheets, <insert your tool here>. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you keep it in front of you every single day. Every hour spent is dipping into your 5,000 hours. I also print this out and have it on my desk, so I review it every morning. You can do the same with the template I provided if you wish.

Get Moving – Time is Short

Don’t get stuck in planning or perfection mode, just start somewhere. You won’t stick to every objective and date and action, that’s ok. We’re not robots. What will happen is that you will begin to see that you need to make decisions and keep balanced against every objective. Every “yes” is a “no” to something else. This is critical to understand. The real risk isn’t by saying “yes” to areas that are part of another objective. The risk is if you start saying “yes” to less meaningful areas that are outside of your entire plan. Then you will start to see your available hours disappear fast.

Likewise, every time you decide to say “no” to something, you’re deciding to do something else instead. Just be sure you are realizing that by the end of 2024, you will either be closer to achieving your life’s mission and vision, or you’ll be farther away from it. And throughout the journey, you might rebalance your time allotment to say, “You know, I think I have a new life mission, and I will need to spend 10% on objective 1, not 35%.” Just be aware that if you do that, you will need to add 25% to another objective.

Time is short. That’s the main point of this exercise and why I’ve found it so useful for me personally, because it makes me more time aware. And in the end, that sense of urgency is what will help us maximize the time we have, let’s not waste it.