Each year for the past 6 years, my husband and I have set aside 1-2 days for an annual summit.

This started the year before we had our first baby, when we knew that in order to make space for a baby in our home, we'd have to change a few things about the way we lived and worked. So that winter, we spent New Year's on a babymoon slash planning retreat in Arizona, where we mapped out some of our overall goals, priorities, and some of the things we expected we'd need to change with a new baby.

Of course, 2020 changed a lot of things for a lot of people, but our annual goal-setting really helped us stay anchored on our values and priorities. We've continued this practice each year, and each year, we get a little bit better at it.

I thought I'd share a bit about how we set an agenda for our annual family summit so you can do it on your own.

Setting the Agenda

We find it helpful to map out a very high-level agenda with the broad buckets of what we want to cover. We also find it fun to stop at many of our favorite places in the city to get this done, and to also bookend each day with a fun evening activity.

Here's what our agenda looked like this year:

Day 1 Agenda

I. Review: 2024 Memories

Look back through your prior year (we tend to refer to photos and our shared calendars) and write a giant list of all of your favorite memories (could be good or bad) from the year, big or small. We find this is a very helpful way of getting our brains wrapped around the enormity of the whole year, not just the most recent few months.

II. Review: 2024 Priorities

Take a few minutes to read over your priorities or goals from last year. As I've blogged out, our priorities for last year were largely around catalyzing the ideas of community & citizenry in our family, which is in large part why I spent so much time laying the groundwork for a block association on my street in 2024.

If you need a little inspiration, start here:

III. 2025 Big-Picture Planning

Look ahead to both of your years ahead; pull in school calendars, family vacation schedules, work conference schedules, whatever you need…write down all that is known, and add in a few placeholders for new ideas, trips, or time off. If you and your partner have a shared calendar, you can add blocks to some of these directly.

IV. Determine 2025 Priorities

Based on earlier conversations, write down 2-3 priorities for the next year. The language doesn’t need to be perfect. We also find it helpful to include a high-level priority, a dedicated owner, and a few ideas of tactics we’ll do to implement that priority. These don’t need to be as fully fleshed out as work-related OKRs or KPIs but you do want some indication to yourself that will help you decide whether it was a success or not at the end of the next year.

V. Big-Picture Discussion Topic 1

This is a placeholder to leave a couple of hours of less structured discussion time to talk through some of the big-picture philosophical areas of parenting. yYu know, the stuff that’s hard to make space for in the midst of the hectic day-to-day. You can adjust or make this broad discussion topic about anything related to you and your partner’s needs, below is an example of a set of questions that might get you thinking.

Day 2 Agenda

VI. Finance Check

This is a placeholder to leave a couple of hours together to get into the weeds on all things finance. We pull out our laptops, open up bank accounts, review investment summaries, credit card statements, and anticipated earnings from the year before and the year ahead. we talk about what’s working, what’s not working, and what changes we need to make. If we have any meaningful financial status changes, such as purchasing property, expecting to change a job, or a significant increase or decrease in childcare expenses.

VII. Big-Picture Discussion Topic 2

This is a second placeholder to leave a couple of hours of less structured discussion time to talk through some of the big-picture philosophical areas of your family or marriage. Here are a few examples of what you could cover in a discussion marriage and relationship.

VIII. Family Values

We find it helpful to have a few anchoring values for our family, these are the things that should remain relatively consistent from one year to the next. Sometimes we review or tweak the language, sometimes we add more sub-bullets to clarify examples of how to live out those values. sometimes we each identify a personal aspirational focus area to work on for the year ahead.

IX. Roles and Responsibilities

Just like a business has its own “operating cadence” of how it gets work done, think about what the ideal “family operating system” looks like for you and your partner. if your kids are older, you might also consider when and how to involve them in this process. the important thing is to set your family up for success with some designated intent and ownership to make sure you have systems in place to achieve your goals. this will look different for everyone, but ours looks something like this]

X. Action Items

Every good planning summit needs to have action items in order to implement some of the changes or ideas you discussed; throughout the summit, you might keep a place in your document for the things that need to get done as a result of the planning.

Conclusion

We've found annual family summits to be an incredible helpful and anchoring way for our family to align on priorities, values, and execution without getting overwhelmed by the day-to-day. Hopefully this helps you with your annual planning, too! And if you've got another agenda or template that you use for your family, I'd love to see it!