Yearly vision: picture the year ahead across every area of your life

A yearly vision is one short line for each area of your life, each finishing the sentence "This time next year, I will...", with a rating beside it of how confident you feel. PiViva's Yearly Vision uses the same eight areas as the Wheel of Life, so you can read the two side by side. It's built on Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's goal-setting research, applied gently across your whole life so that nothing important gets forgotten.

Why do our yearly goals usually cover only two areas of life?

Think back to the last time you set goals for the year. If you're anything like most of us, they were probably about work, and perhaps about getting a bit fitter, with maybe a vague resolution about drinking more water thrown in for good measure.

That's completely understandable, because those parts of life tend to be loud, with deadlines, numbers and people regularly asking how things are going.

Your friendships, your fun, your surroundings and your own growth are much more polite. They don't send reminders or chase you for updates, so they can drift for a whole year without anyone noticing, until one day something gives and you realise how long it's been since you saw your oldest friend or did anything purely for the joy of it.

What is a yearly vision based on?

It rests on two foundations. The first is goal-setting theory from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, whose research found that specific, challenging goals lead to better results than vague ones, provided you're committed to them and can see how you're getting on.

The second is the Wheel of Life, traditionally credited to Paul J. Meyer, who founded the Success Motivation Institute in 1960. The wheel divides a life into areas, so you can see at a glance which ones are being looked after and which are being left out in the cold.

Put the two together and you get a clear, checkable goal for every area of your life, written in a way you can look back on in twelve months and say, honestly, how you got on.

How does Yearly Vision work in PiViva?

The idea is simple: you finish the same sentence eight times, once for each area of your life, beginning with "This time next year, I will...". You write one short line for each area, and then add a confidence rating for how likely you think you are to get there, which takes no more than a few minutes once you've decided what you want.

Doing all eight really is the point. Writing a line for the areas you'd normally overlook makes any drift visible, and once you can see it, you can do something kind about it.

The confidence rating is the part to be gently honest about. If you've written something ambitious and rated yourself a two, you've found the area that needs a little planning, and that's a very helpful discovery. If you've rated yourself a ten across the board, it may be worth asking whether you've set the bar a touch too low, since a little stretch tends to bring out the best in us.

Each line can be turned straight into a goal with its own actions, so nothing you write gets stranded on the page, and the vision you sketched on a quiet evening becomes something you can work on week by week.

What if you only manage a few of the eight?

Then you've learned something real about the year you're actually having, and that's a perfectly good place to begin. Some years are simply full, with a new baby, a house move or a demanding job taking up most of the space, and a vision that honestly reflects that is far more useful than eight lines written out of a sense of duty.

Read your vision again after six months. You'll probably be pleasantly surprised by how much has moved, and you may notice one area that hasn't moved at all. That area deserves a proper, friendly look. You can score it on the Wheel of Life, or take it into Goal Setting and give it a few small actions.

If one of your lines feels flat or forced, My Ideal Life can help you work out what you really want in that part of your life.

You can sit down and write yours today. A year from now you'll be very glad you did, and you may well find that the parts of life you'd been neglecting are the ones that bring you the most happiness.