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.
Access the 5,000 Hour Plan Template for Free
(You can click File > Make a Copy using Google Draw to start your plan)
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.
Access the 5,000 Hour Plan Template for Free
(You can click File > Make a Copy using Google Draw to start your plan)
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%)
- Complete Project XYZ by March 31st.
- Publish 1 new article on our blog each month.
- Get certified in Community Clean Ups by April 15th.
- 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.
Access the 5,000 Hour Plan Template for Free
(You can click File > Make a Copy using Google Draw to start your plan)
