How Ali Abdaal’s Goal Framework Changed How I Plan My Business
I’ve always struggled with how to set goals.
Well, more accurately, I’ve always struggled with setting super high goals, waiting to the last minute to do anything about them, then failing miserably. Part of it was trying to figure out what my “5 year plan” was, but not knowing what that meant for today. Earlier this year, I watched an Ali Abdaal video about his goal setting framework and it changed how I set goals (and now achieve them more often).
Before you set your 2026 goals, let me save you some time and share what worked for me in 2025 (and how I’m approaching 2026).
Start With Where You Want To Be 1 Year From Now
It’s December, so a great place to start.
The thing I fear most is being in the exact same place in 1 year that I am today. Don’t say you want to be a billionaire, but pick something that you know you can achieve with some serious hard work that you can control. For example, if you want to grow your Instagram followers, you can’t control who subscribes, but you can control how much you post, how consistent you are, and how you analyze analytics.
You have where you want to be in 1 year, but how do you get there?
Break The Goals Down Into Smaller Goals With Smaller Timelines
I don’t know about you, but I am not fully sure what I’m doing next month, much less next year, so we need to break the goal into smaller, sequential parts.
Start by figuring out what needs to happen for each annual goal by the end of the first quarter of the year (end of March). This becomes your first of 4 quarterly sub-goals. Now do the same thing for what you need to do by the end of January, then by the end of the first week in January.
The idea is to keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces until you know exactly what you need to do today so that you can do the next small thing tomorrow and keep going till you hit or exceed the goals.
One key is you don’t have to fill in all the blank space when you’re getting started, so you don’t need to know what every month’s goal is, just the next month’s.
Why This Works For Me
Ali’s framework gave me the best of both worlds: setting a longer term goal I can shoot for, but also understanding exactly what to do now to make it a reality.
To lessen the chances of things slipping up, Ali also recommends reviewing your goals every day, which I started (mostly) doing. Every day, I review that week’s goals, then every Sunday, I review how last week’s goals went, the goals from annual all the way down to monthly, then set the next week’s goals. When you’re at month-end or quarter-end, you do the same thing as well just also setting those higher-level goals.
I’m still working on consistently reviewing my goals every day and making sure that I’m not letting self get distracted and delay weekly goals for another week, but it’s a definite improvement.
