Hello and welcome to Best Laid Plans.

This is your host, Sarah Hart Unger, and this is the podcast where we talk all things

planning and planning adjacent.

As this episode airs, it is the beginning of a new month.

It is also the beginning of a fresh quintile for me and one that I truly love. I consider November

1st through December 31st to be like my personal reflection season. And during that time, I definitely spend

more time than usual journaling, thinking about how I like to plan, setting up my new system,

thinking about what I want the next year to look like, re-evaluating my goals, and kind of just

clearing the decks and getting ready

for a new fresh start. It may seem like two months is a lot, but of course, it's not like I'm

putting pause on the rest of life. And I find that if I leave a lot of those planning items till

the very end of December, they really don't get the attention they deserve,

especially because that often tends to be more of a celebratory family focus time anyway.

So I consider these whole two months to be fair game for lots of this kind of thought

process and exercise.

And I encourage you to maybe consider incorporating some of

these practices for yourself and seeing if it benefits you to spend more time thinking about your

next year. So on this episode, I am going to spend a little bit of time talking about what a

planning retreat might look like.

And in fact, I did have a bit of a planning retreat. I didn't call it that at the time,

but that's kind of what it turned into with my husband recently. So I'll talk about what we did

and different ways you might want to consider having planning focused retreats, whether

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