Building a Personal Roadmap for Your 2025 Resolutions

It’s the New Year and the time many of us make resolutions and set goals for the year ahead. While your resolutions may succeed, or may fail, I’d like to offer a not so new approach to help your 2025 goals become reality. How about building a roadmap? Without incremental steps to achieve those resolutions, they will soon fall apart. This is where a personal roadmap can help.?

Many of you may have heard of or use product roadmaps at work. For those that aren’t familiar with the term: A product roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines the vision, direction, and progress of a product or service over time. It helps teams align their efforts to achieve product or service goals by highlighting deliverables. (If you’re interested in learning more about Product Roadmaps, I recommend Roman Pichler’s book “Strategize”- Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age.)

So why not try building a personal roadmap for your 2025 resolutions??

For example, if you want to run a half marathon by the end of the year, set up quarterly outcomes that will help you achieve your goal. Make plans to visit your roadmap on a regular basis. Ask the question – are you doing the things necessary to reach your desired outcome? The roadmap is directional, and fluid, not a precise project plan. It will need to be adjusted. Maybe a certain workout schedule didn’t produce the necessary result. You can adjust as you go!

Keep it simple. It doesn’t have to be perfect! Put something in writing and refine as you go. A roadmap for personal goals could look something like the following and only take minutes to build.

Resolution: Run half marathon by end of 2025

Q1: Walk three miles a day, six days a week

Q2: Start running three times a week

???????? Complete a five-mile run by the end of June

Q3: Run four days a week

???????? Complete an eight-mile run by end of September

Q4: Run four-five days a week

??????? ?Complete a ten-mile run by end of October

?????? ??Run half marathon in December

If roadmaps can be useful in the workplace, why not use them in our personal lives?

Have you set up a roadmap for a personal goal before? Did it work? (Feel free to let me know in the comments)?

Let’s make 2025 the year our resolutions become reality!