A friend of the family recently recommended "Living Forward" by Michael Hyatt & Daniel Harkavy in response to a question I had on getting to the next level of performance and intentional living. I can honestly say that it is one of the most helpful books I've read on purposeful living and setting your priorities. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for more clarity in their life and helps you see the bigger picture of your future.
Living Forward outlines writing your "life plan," a short 5-16 page paper on your priorities in life, your reasons for them, and the steps you take to build on them intentionally. They have you regularly review your life plan and make modifications to it each week as you go. Your life plan is hyper-specific to your life and gets very personal; I like to see it as a writing down of your thoughts in an organized fashion.
The first set of questions it asks you is "how do you want to be remembered" and has a category for each group of people in your life (ex. God, spouse, parents, children, friends, etc.). This helps you be more intentional about showing up in those relationships with the end goal in mind.
It then has you write down your major priorities in life, ex. Faith, work, family, friends, health, etc., and has you put those in order. From there, you write what they call your "accounts," which is a more in-depth view of those major priorities and can include specific people or avenues of your life.
It asks you why or purpose statement for this account, you outline your motivations and reasons for having this a priority in your life. The following question is your envisioned future, basically the where do you see yourself in x years, and has you write it as though it were true today, so for a health category. An example for health might go something like "I am always in a state of vibrancy and awareness, I am fully present in every interaction I have with family and friends. I work out regularly to build up my strength and generate energy..."
It's optional, but there's a spot for an inspirational quote (I found most of mine from Proverbs), which helps you build the motivation to work on that account.
It then has you write down your current reality, basically where you are at this point in your life, what you are doing to build that account, and things you might be doing that prevents you from going to where you want to be. Some of the items for the health account might include "I am not staying as focused on my food plan and often have difficulties on the weekend staying committed," it forces you to say the quiet part out loud. It forces you to look at yourself seriously and realistically at the significant areas you failed or are building up.
Once you have your list of current realities for each account, it moves over to specific commitments; the basic idea is you write down a list of obligations you will hold to throughout the weeks/months that will build up that account. For example, in health, it might say something like "be in bed by 9:30 pm every weeknight" and "run a 5k by 10/10/20" this gives you an obtainable goal to work on, and through regular review, you update it with new goals and commitments.
One of the things I found especially interesting that they highly suggested was to take a full day off to work on your life plan, eight+ hours to write. A whole day is quite a commitment, but the value from it is definitely worth the investment. It has you take your time going through each life account and forces you to be very specific in each area of your life and prevents you from rushing things or from hitting blocks. Typically there are 4-7 priorities in the life plan, and 5-14 accounts within those priorities.
One of the things that drew me back originally was thinking "a life plan, that's a fixed document and my life changes, I don't even know if I will be even in the same industry in the future." But the book takes that into account and has you continually reviewing and updating, so you're not writing your life plan of the future, your writing it of your current future.