A couple folks wrote in responding to Vibes and years asking how I did annual planning.

I start with a question: "if I had a magic wand, what things would I want to change about the business?" My answers can be concrete or abstract; they can be lofty or object-level. They just have to be the right answers, and they have to be honest.

For instance, when I went through this exercise in December the first few answers that came to mind were:

• I'd make it so that there's an actual top-of-funnel system to drive user acquisition, instead of the "write a bunch of content and hope that it works" system that's been the watchword thus far.
• I'd get rid of the janky editor and replace it with something better.
• I'd have a magically evergreen series of walkthrough videos.

And so on.

Once I have a list of answers that feel correct, I shape them into concrete deliverable projects:

• Build a top-end marketing engine that is self-documented and legible enough to hand off to a talented writer, with clear analytics and lifecycle emails.
• Rewrite the core editor abstraction.
• Plan out a list of sixty walkthrough videos and find a freelancer who can execute on them.

You get the idea.

There's no real shaping or scoping or sizing or any of that — the exercise is to get the project into a single sentence that is clear and falsifiable. Then it becomes a project for the year.

That's it!

I think it's easy to underestimate how long a year is, and how much good work — when it's focused wisely and tactically — can be done. Even now, a "bad" week in terms of technical productivity means only fifteen or so hours of flow; extrapolate that out to a year, and that's 750 hours. Buttondown is not large; there are very few projects that could not be accomplished within 750 hours.

Giving yourself permission to devote yourself to a task is a superpower.