While I love the Bright Method’s ability to help you plan long term (e.g., calendaring when to start your passport renewal process in three years), one thing missing from the Bright Method is a high-level snapshot of your long-term planning.
Enter Kelsey Wharton’s “The Years are Short” spreadsheet.
Here’s my written article about it, too.
Here’s an article about the Bird’s Eye View.
And finally, episode 33 is about “Long-Term Planning: How to feel like YOU & create long-term plans.”
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Full Transcript
Ep 78. Long-Term Planning Tool
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so today I want to talk about this tool that I’ve shared before on Instagram and I’m sure on my newsletter that’s called The Years Are Short Spreadsheet. Now, this was a spreadsheet that was not created by me. It’s not a tool that I came up with. It’s this woman named Kelsey Wharton. I’ll link everything in the show notes that she — I’ll link her original blog post in the show notes. And a friend had read about it actually in Sarah Hart-Unger’s blog, and Sarah Hart-Unger has been on our podcast. There are a lot of small world connections here. But Sarah, on her blog, had written about Kelsey’s spreadsheet, and then a client turned friend sent it to me, and that is how I started using it. And I’m gonna talk a bit about the tool today.
The reason I’m bringing it up today is that I feel like, for me, after Thanksgiving it’s just such a — suddenly the rest of the year starts flying by. We celebrate Christmas, so there’s a lot of celebration around that. And especially this year Christmas is coming really quickly. But I think we all get it, no matter if you celebrate Christmas or not. It’s that end-of-the-year flurry, and then suddenly it will be 2025. And sometimes people go to goal setting on that, and I’ve done some episodes about my views on goal setting that you can check out. I’ll link them in the show notes as well.
Future Planning – 1:46
But for me, it’s more of a time that I guess I start kind of looking up and looking forward a bit more but less on a goal-setting standpoint and just how is life coming together. I think this probably is even more true now that my kids are — well, at least one of them is school aged and we have to deal with summers, and around now is when summer camps happen. And so, I’m looking ahead six months from a practical standpoint, and it kind of makes me keep looking ahead longer as well.
And one thing that I realized with The Bright Method up until, I think, two years ago when this client sent me this information. Something that I love about The Bright Method and just digital calendars in general is that you can plan really far in advance. You know, I can repeat things annually. I can put things like, “My passport expires in five years,” and calendar that stuff. There are a lot of things you can do in the long term. But whether you’re using a paper planner or a digital calendar, even if you can plan long term, it’s hard to get that bird’s-eye view of what’s going on, of what are we looking at long term in a snapshot view.
Now, on the work front, I think of this as kind of the bird’s-eye view. I do this in my personal life, but it’s more like the immediate personal life, like what are the big buckets of things I’m managing right now. And that’s called, in my mind, The Bird’s-eye View, and I have an episode on that, which I’ll also link in the show notes. There are gonna be a lot of links in the show notes! [Laughs] But still, even if you have that kind of snapshot of what your current life looks like right now, there’s a bit of struggle of seeing the long-term snapshot, and this is where this tool comes in. I’m gonna describe the tool, and then we can talk about it a little bit more.
The Years Are Short Spreadsheet Tool – 3:22
Basically, it’s a spreadsheet, and I’ll link to it, you know, so you can see this visually in the show notes. But I think you’ll get the picture even if you’re driving or walking a dog right now. It’s a spreadsheet, and you have in one column the year. I actually went with academic years, so this year is 2024 to 2025. And then the next column is our ages, me and my husband. So, for you, it might be your age and your partner’s age if they’re different. If they’re close enough, then I just kind of lump them together. And then I have my oldest daughter’s age as of September 1st, and that makes sense because I’m doing an academic calendar. It’s just the way my brain works right now. And so, it’s my oldest daughter’s age on that date, my oldest daughter’s grade; my second daughter’s age, my second daughter’s grade. So those are four columns: age, school-grade year, age, school-grade year. And then the next one is notes. Now, I’ve also added some other columns. I’m gonna go into those in a little bit. But just to stop it there, I think that just alone is really valuable.
Now, just to be clear, I think that this is super useful if you had kids. But even if you don’t have kids, this is still a really, really useful tool. And what you do is you fill it out, obviously the years, the ages, things like that just so you can start seeing how ages line up, when people will be in different grades. That might have an impact on when kids are at the same school or at different schools or in middle school and lower school, all that kind of stuff. And then you can use that “notes” column to start adding things.
So, for example, I added in things like — and I’m sure Kelsey Wharton’s article talks about these. I don’t think they’re my brainchild, but things like big birthday celebrations. We both turn 40 this academic year, and so, what do we want to do for that? It’s really just flagging it, like, “40th birthday is this year.” Another one is when my youngest might start at my oldest’s school. I put that in the calendar as well. Another one is our ten-year anniversary. Another one is when I’m like, “Okay, both girls will be in school. Do we get a summer nanny instead of a lot of camps that summer? Would that be more cost effective and great for the girls?” I have ones that just note when my oldest daughter will go to middle school. It just says: “H going to middle school” and then “H going to high school” in these columns. And it just helps start having that kind of zooming-out snapshot of the long term of our life.
Now, over time I’ve also added other things here including my parents’ ages, my in-laws’ ages, and then I’ve also added all of our cousin ages. So we have, I think, three more cousins in addition to, obviously, my kids, and it’s just helpful to see all their ages as well because if we want to plan bigger family trips, it’s helpful to understand, “How old is everybody?” especially the kids on that front to make that work.
This is such a simple but valuable tool when you are trying to be like, “Wait, when are kids gonna be this age?” or “When would we want to do a Disney World trip?” or things like that. Even, again, if you don’t have kids, if you’re like, “I really want to have a big trip with my parents at this time,” or “When will my college reunions be,” or things like that. You just start being able to have somewhere where you can put that information and keep it for the future.
I would also throw out there that if you’re someone who’s dreamt of starting your own business or transitioning out of a career or maybe just starting a new hobby at a certain point, I do like calendaring that stuff. Even if it’s three years from now I’m like, “Consider doing this.” In three years, future me will be reminded. But this tool is also a great place that you could park that information as well. I find that just being able to park information in a place that I know I’ll come back to and look is really, really valuable in helping me let it go.
Now, speaking of that, you do want to make sure you come back and look at this thing. Now, in the beginning, you might actually be kind of obsessed about it if you’re like me and look at it too much. But eventually that novelty wears off and you kind of forget about it. So really use that calendar to remind you to go look at it. Mine is in a Google Document. It also allows me to share it with my husband, and I think I even shared it with my sisters when I was nerding out and really deep into that obsession phase. But over time, then, I also have calendared time at a cadence that makes sense for me. I think I do it in August and then around this time of year as well along with the summer schedule planning times to look at it. Then it’s just in my calendar. It’s like, “Check this out,” and I believe Kelsey Wharton calls it her Years Are Short Spreadsheet, and you could calendar whatever cadence makes sense to look at for you to review it. And this will just help make sure that you don’t forget about it. What I like doing is calendaring time to do that, or it might be part of my logistics planning session, and then I link to it so that it’s easy for me to go check it out.
Examples for People Without Kids – 8:07
I feel like the examples are so easy to come up with with kids, but I just wanted to share a couple more examples for people without kids and then obviously that people with kids could use if you would like to as well.
Some ideas are, as I said, high school, college, or grad school reunions. That was Kelsey Wharton’s idea. Your big birthday celebrations, same. Your partner’s, obviously same. Big milestones for your parents, like their birthdays or anniversaries that you might want to celebrate with advanced notice. That was actually my sister’s idea, and that can be really helpful. And again, you’re looking at these once or twice a year, and so, you’ll see them coming up, and you’ll think, “Ooh, you know what? We need to start planning that.” [Laughs] And so, that’s when you would actually build out in your calendar the time to do the planning. This doesn’t replace calendaring time to do any of the stuff that brings any of this to life in the way that you want, but it is a place to park those ideas and then remind you of them when it would be relevant.
Again, as I said, ages of nieces or nephews. That’s a really nice one, so that even if you don’t have kids you know their ages. Retirement for you or loved ones, so that could be parents to your partner and, again, your own retirement goals. And then any potentially goal years to buy anything or have any big financial investments, so anything from houses to moving houses to maybe getting a second home somewhere if you want to do that. I personally can’t see us doing that. I like simplicity. But we’ll find out. [Laughs]
And even bigger things like if you have to buy into a partnership. If you’re a physician and you’re in a partnership group or an attorney or things like that, that can be a big thing to plot out as well, when will you have those coming up so you can keep those in mind. Even if you’re a member of some sort of club like a country club, beach club, that kind of thing. When you turn certain ages sometimes those types of investments are triggered, and you can plot those out as well. Just really kind of giving yourself any of these flags of, “These are big things on the horizon. I might not need to think about them right now, but I don’t want to lose track of them and then have them go by without me thinking about it or I have this last-minute scramble.”
So again, I’m gonna share just a version so you can see a visual snapshot of this that you could use in the show notes and a link to an article that I just wanted to throw out these ideas, that as you’re walking around or driving that’s usually when I have my better ideas anyway, that you can capture those ideas and kind of start noodling on them.
Random Side Notes – 10:27
So three super random side notes that I wanted to share, they’re completely unrelated.
Number one is this is a random spreadsheet tip that a paralegal taught me. If you don’t know this, and some of you definitely do, but if you don’t, in a spreadsheet, you can have a column of numbers that increase by one. So for those ages columns, it’s like 38, 39, 40, 41. Instead of having to type all of those out — and you can do this for any other skip counting-type thing, but just throwing it out for this example — just do the first four rows, select them (just the actual entry piece, scroll and get those four blocks of the 38, 39, 40, 41), and then take that bottom right corner of the selection and drag it all the way down, and then it’ll keep increasing in that way so you don’t have to type them out. This just saves you from having to type all of those out for you and any kids and any nieces and any nephews and any parents. There’s a lot of typing out, so that will be a big time saver if you want to check that out.
Unrelated point number two is around when I plotted out my kids’ grades, I happened to be listening to The Family Firm by Emily Oster, which was another recommendation from someone else in this community, and I just want to throw it out that this chart came in very handy for me as we were deciding whether to hold our youngest back. She has a late August birthday, and so, we were like, “Do we send her when she technically could go, or do we hold her back knowing that she would at least be probably one of the youngest kids in the grade and potentially given how much people are holding kids back these days, potentially by three or four months she could be the youngest.” And so, we were trying to figure that out, and being able to plot out, I actually did two versions of this. I saved a version of whether we would send her this year or if we would send her a year later, and it was just incredibly useful data to be able to see how it came together.
The reason I bring up Emily Oster’s book is she has a lot about this redshirting concept, and so, just throwing it out there for anybody else in that boat that there was a lot of useful information and data and studies and all of that on that element of decision making if you want to check that out. We decided to actually hold her back just for one year just to allow that, for a variety of reasons. But more to the point, being able to have the two different versions helped us make an informed decision.
For example, if we hold her back, which we will, she won’t actually overlap with my oldest in middle school or high school, and that was kind of sad for me, and I’m just glad that I was able to make this decision in an informed way and see that versus kind of discovering it later and being like, “Would I have changed my mind?” We decided not to. It’s something that — this is so TMI and personal. So sorry I’m just droning on about it. But I actually think there are pros and cons to it. On the one hand, I love the idea of them getting to be in school together. On the other hand, I like the idea that their relationship will be kind of protected from school and just this home, special thing because they are so close and having school with all of its complicated emotional relationships, all that kind of stuff, would maybe threaten that would be a real bummer. So that’s the bright side I’m looking at. Who knows. I don’t think we ever can know.
But more to the point, I was really grateful to have these sheets and being able to see that as we made this decision in a really concrete, specific way so that I am aware of it, it’s an informed decision, and I can own it and I’m not wishing I had thought of it earlier when we were going into these decisions when she’s this young. These kinds of decisions can have kind of big ripple effects on those elements of things. I don’t think they’re big ripples in the scheme of life, but it’s interesting to see how just kids’ ages, your ages, parents’ ages all interact and start spotting those things now versus being surprised by them down the road. Speaking of throwing back to when kids will be in college and when you might want to retire and all that kind of stuff, it’s all helpful to see in that chart.
All right, on a lighter note and a very random note, the last point is (somebody else shared this with me) did you know that fourth graders and their families in this country get free access to National Parks through it’s called The Every Kid Outdoors Program. And you do have to register, but it is free. A client shared that with me, and I thought it was really awesome, and so, I’ve put it on my chart, and I just wanted to throw it out there for you as well so that as kids are entering fourth grade and you are planning, you know, summer and school-year trips, you can keep that in mind because that’s a pretty cool part.
All right! I hope you enjoyed that. I hope it was the right fit for how you’re feeling on this Monday morning after Thanksgiving. It is a weirdly nerdy, addicting thing to set up and play with and start seeing and plotting out and all of that kind of stuff. So have fun with it! And make sure to calendar time to revisit it over time. I know you will be so addicted to it that you’ll be like, “Why would I ever need a reminder to look at this?” But you will. [Laughs] So put that in the calendar as well. Again, I will have a ton of links for you in the show notes if you are interested in checking those out, and enjoy, Happy Holiday season for real, and let me know if you have any questions. I’ll talk to you soon, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
