How to Make Time for Your Goals in 2026
Far too often we make goals for the year only for them to be forgotten by February
January is often the month of discarded resolutions. If you are struggling to make time for your goals in 2026, you aren’t alone. Last time, I spoke about doing a time management audit of 2025 to find out how you spent your time and what got in the way of achieving your goals. I showed you how to build your personal time guidebook, which includes rules and constraints to implement in 2026 when it comes to allotting your precious time. But how do you actually ensure that you implement those lessons and make this year the year you actually make time for your goals?
One of the main obstacles to achieving our goals is that we tend to focus on a whole year. We decide what we are going to achieve by December, which means that the deadline is always 365 days away – so you’ve got loads of time. Now that may sound great as it makes the task seem achievable, but the problem is that when the finish line is so far away it is incredibly easy to let January slip into February without making a single dent in your priorities i.e. you do absolutely nothing to make time for your goals. In this post, I will show you how to ditch traditional New Year's resolutions and instead use a 12 week framework to which will spur you into action when it comes to making time for your goals.
The concept of a 12 week timeframe was conceived of by Brian P Moran and Michael Lennington in their book ‘The 12 Week Year’. I read this in 2024 and have found the concepts enormously helpful, so I wanted to share their ideas with you, here in this post, so that you can benefit from their guidance when it comes to making time for your goals in 2026.
Finding for your goals is hard when the finish line is 12 months away
Why is it so hard to make time for your goals?
In society it is common practice to set goals once a year; to think about what you want to achieve over a 12 month period. However, the human brain isn't naturally wired to maintain urgency over a 52-week period. This is why you often see the ‘January Burst’. One example is the new sign-ups to the gym in January, where it’s so busy during the first month of the year that the regulars are fed up with queuing to use the machines. Fortunately for them this is followed by the ‘February slump’ as most people’s enthusiasm wanes, their attendance slacks off and they tell themselves they’ll go back next month when they’ve got more time and anyway, December’s ages away, they’ve got the whole year to make time for their goal of getting fit. By April they haven’t worked out at all, but are still paying the monthly subscription, telling themselves that they’ll get back to it soon. But we all know this is unlikely and all they’re doing is making the gym rich!
When you use a 12-week period to achieve your goals the end of the "year" is always in sight. You don't have the luxury of procrastination and it’s time-wasting activities (which I talk about in this post) which are often the killer, because there’s no sense of urgency, as opposed to not actually having the time. When you only have 12 weeks to achieve your goal every week counts as a month, and every day counts as a week. This structure forces you to take action and that action needs to be based on the data from your annual productivity review.
Focus is Key
The first mistake in goal setting is trying to achieve too many goals and change everything at once. If you’re like me there’s probably lots of things you want to work on in 2026, but just choose one. It’s not that you have to give up on this goal in 12-week’s time, but by focusing completely on this you create a habit or routine that you will be able to build on in the future. Instead of working on four goals (or not, as we explored above) all year you’ll work on each of them in turn. You’ll be able to focus completely on this one goal and ensure that you are making time for this goal as you’ll only have one to think about.
The benefit to this will be that it will be easier to address the challenges that you encountered in 2025 when trying to find time for this goal. That’s because the reasons you didn’t make time for this goal will be specific to that goal. The reason you often worked overtime is likely to be different to the reason you rarely spent the ten minutes a day meditating that you promised yourself you would do, because no matter how much overtime you’re doing everyone has ten minutes a day. (If you’re shaking your head at this point just take a quick look at your phone to see how much time you spent on social media yesterday – I bet it was more than 10 minutes!).
So pick one goal and make it specific; I know you’ve heard it before, but unless you can measure your goal you won’t know whether or not you’ve achieved it.
Time challenges are likely to be specific to each of your goals
Review the time challenges for this goal
Looking back at your time management audit what got in the way of working on this last year, why didn’t you find time for this goal? If it wasn’t a goal for you in 2025 you can still use what you learnt from your audit when it comes to ensuring the challenges you encountered don’t get in the way of this goal. If your goal this year is to find five minutes a day for a gratitude practice and last year you wanted to meditate for ten minutes a day but by the evening, when you’d made time to do it you were usually very tired and just couldn’t find the energy, learn the lesson and make time for your gratitude practice in the morning, even if it means getting up ten minutes earlier.
Apply your constraints
As a reminder, constraints are rules that we create for ourselves in advance so we don’t have to make decisions in the moment. When you ask your brain to decide something now, in this moment, it is going to want to take the route of least resistance. It will want to watch TV instead of practising gratitude, but constraints can help. Let me give you an easy example – I don’t drink alcohol in the evening. From experience I know that drinking after about 6pm means I won’t sleep well and I’ll feel rotten the next day. When someone offers me a drink in the evening I don’t need to spend time thinking about my answer, I just rely on the rule I’ve set myself and politely decline. So a constraint you could set for yourself is that you only watch TV once you’ve done your gratitude practice. It’s not negotiable. There’s no switching on your favourite programme telling yourself you’ll do your gratitude practice once you’ve watched one episode. As we both know, it just won’t happen. So make a rule, a constraint, and stick to it.
Implementing boundaries
What did your time audit identify that you said ‘yes’ to last year when really you should have said ‘no’? Commit to not making the same mistake this year. Think about possible commitments that could get in the way of making time for your first goal. What boundaries are you going to put in place? If your colleague is always asking you to go for coffee when you really want to get projects finished and go home on time write out what you could say to her and practise it in front of the bathroom mirror so you’re ready the next time she asks.
A weekly review is essential when it comes to keeping on track with finding time for your goals
Holding Yourself Accountable
In the 12 Week Year system you don’t wait until December to see if you are on track. Instead you measure both your actions and your results on a weekly basis. This can be part of a weekly review, which you should be making time for. It doesn’t need to take a long time – 15 minutes is enough.
In the book these are called ‘lead’ and ‘lag’ indicators. The lead indicators are your actions, an examination of whether you actually did what you said you would do. How often did you practise gratitude last week? Did you implement your constraint of not watching TV until you’d done so? Did you turn down your colleagues offer for coffee two out of three times as you told yourself you’d do?
The lag indicators are your results. You may be practising gratitude to improve your mental health. Perhaps you’re using a scale of 1-10 to assess your mood each day. Have your scores improved from the previous week? When it comes to overtime how often did you bring work home? How many hours overtime did you actually work last week? Use this not as an opportunity to beat yourself up or feel bad and give up, but as a learning tool. If things didn’t go to plan why was that? If you didn’t make time for your goals what got in the way? Have you implemented your constraints and boundaries? Do they need to be tweaked? Are there others you need to put in place?
CONCLUSION
Hopefully, you now have a clear idea of how to make your goal-setting practice a worthwhile task so that you can see success in 2026. By taking the lessons from your annual productivity review and applying them to this 12-week format, you create a system that prioritises execution over wishful thinking.
Remember, this is not about self-criticism; it is about learning what worked and what didn't so you can build a better future. You have the data, you have the rules, and now you have the timeframe. Don't wait for next December to see where your time went and try to work out why you didn’t achieve your goals yet again.
What is the one specific goal you are going to focus on for your first 12-week sprint of 2026? Let me know in the comments below—I’d love to hear what you’re working on!
If you found this guide helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend or colleague who wants to make 2026 their most productive year yet!