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.

Here's a link to a Google Docs version of this sample template. Just make a copy and make it your own. Enjoy!

Getting Started and Prework

An annual summit is a great way to get on the same page and set the vibe for the year ahead. I recommend blocking off 1-2 days (plus some optiona time for pre-work) to really dive into things and give you both space to cover all ground. (Pro tip: Don’t stress if it feels awkward at first—new processes always take time to fall into place.) Try mixing it up with conversations outside the house, and definitely plan something fun to break up the planning, like a fancy dinner, movie night, or even a weekend getaway.

If you’re up for prework, tweak the agenda to fit your needs, reflect on any sticky moments from the past year, and think of a few questions to help make those moments better next time. Jot down any big dates for work trips, school schedules, vacations, or just fun ideas. It’s a simple way to build a roadmap for a year that feels more intentional—and more fun.

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:

Crystal Family Summit - Annual Planning Agenda 2024

Day 1:

• Morning

  • Review 2024 priorities

  • Review 2024 memories

  • Big-picture 2025 planning

• Lunch

• Over Coffee: Open discussion: Meeting kids’ needs

• Evening activity: Burlesque

Day 2:

• Morning: Financial planning

• Lunch: 2025 annual planning

• Over Coffee

  • Open discussion: Marriage & relationship needs

  • Roles & responsibilities 

• Evening activity: Nicole Kidman movie

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.

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:

Sample Priorities for Annual Family Planning

• Priority 1: Eat healthier as a family

• Priority 2: Spend more time with grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles

• Priority 3: Get family + kids more involved in our local neighborhood / community

Sample Reflection Questions:

• On a scale of 1-10, how well do we feel we successfully implemented each of our priorities from last year?

• What specifically worked about our priorities last year? What were our biggest wins?

• What specifically did not work about last year? Why not? Was this a miss on the priority we set or on the execution of that idea? 

• What are some things we should think about doing differently going into next year?

• Where do we each want to prioritize our time and effort toward these priorities?

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.

Sample Questions to Guide Big-Picture Planning:

• What work or family trips do you have coming up in 2025?

• When are school breaks?

• When do you or your partner expect to have particularly hectic work periods?

Considerations to Note While Planning:

• How will we manage family logistics during the busy seasons?

• Who should we invite to join us on our family vacation?

• How much time do we need for ourselves? With others?

• What do we want weekends to look like next year?

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.

Pro Tip: We have found it works best to assign an owner for each priority and a few ideas of how you want to implement that priority or goal. Otherwise, it's really hard to determine at the end of the year how well it worked.

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.

Meeting Kids Needs

Sample Discussion Areas: 

• How do we want to manage school breaks this year?

• What’s our ideal weekend mode?

• How can we get out of town more?

• How often should we plan grandparent and cousin time? What should this look like?

• How often should we plan play dates? When’s the best time for these?

• What’s our enrichment and learning philosophy for the kids? (What our our learning goals for each of them in the year ahead?)

• What are some things we want to remember to do with our kids in the area next year?

• What do we want to do with family trips next year?

• How might we each get more 1-1 time with our kids?

• Any emotional or behavioral issues to address? 

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.

Finance Check-Up

Sample Areas to Cover:

• Current year in review on finances and budgeting

• Anticipated earnings or meaningful changes for the year area

• Portfolio review: Savings and investment philosophy (and discussion on changes needed)

• Meaningful “change of state” financial events expected in the year ahead (ie: buying a house, changing jobs, moving, increased childcare expenses)

• Document and process review

• When to plan next meeting with external financial advisor, accountant, etc.

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.

Ex: Meeting Each Other’s Needs
Sample Discussion Areas:

• How often do we need date nights next year? 

• How can we get 1-1 time when kids are around?

• Do we want to plan on any 1-1 trips together in the year ahead?

• What’s working well about the way we are meeting each other’s needs?

• How can we improve the way we meet each other’s needs? 

• How do we want to coordinate friend time together in the year ahead (ie: game nights, group hangs)?

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.

Sample Values:

These are our current three high-level values; for each of them we have a list of things that we can do to live out these values; the high-level ideas don’t change all that often, but the implementation or focus areas do.

1. Lead a healthy life

2. Be engaged in the world around us

3. Be a person of high-integrity

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]

Sample Operating System Items

• Communications and operations

  • Have weekly check-ins with set standing agenda (pick a time and place for this)

  • Review weekend planning 1 month out

  • Determine family trip planning 3-6 months out

  • Have quarterly financial updates

  • Have annual check-in to set next year’s priorities (and midyear check-in to review progress in the summer)

• Individual responsibilities

  • What you or your partner are individually responsible for in each area

• Lists of things we want to remember

  • Things to do with kids on weekends

  • Restaurants we want to go to next year

  • Places we want to travel as a family

  • People to have play dates with

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.

Sample Action Items:

• Update weekly check-in agenda

• Plan kids’ summer camp schedules

• Block time for midyear check-in

• Update financial planning documents

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!

Here's a link to a Google Docs version of this sample template. Just make a copy and make it your own. Enjoy!