Why we deleted 50% of our 2026 objectives

Planning season hits different when you realize that a packed plan isn't ambitious, it's confused. Alane and Micah share the uncomfortable truth about their 2026 planning process: they deleted over 50% of their goals, and it was the smartest move they've made all year. 

What You'll Learn:

• Why focusing on everything means accomplishing nothing
• The exact 3-meeting process they used to refine their annual plan
• How ClickUp's annotate feature revolutionized their team collaboration
• Why goal ownership changes everything about execution
• The weekly accountability system that prevents roadblocks from becoming disasters

Tools Mentioned:

• ClickUp (project management and goal tracking)
• Gamma.app (presentation software) 

This episode is raw, honest, and packed with actionable insights for anyone feeling overwhelmed by their business goals. Sometimes the most ambitious thing you can do is say no to good ideas so you can say yes to great ones.

Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Thank you for supporting the podcast!

For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

Want more valuable content and helpful tips?

Explore our Courses/Programs:

• Complete our self-paced Process Mapping course

Enjoy our Free Tools:

• Free Asana, ClickUp, or Monday.com Selector Tool
• Get 25 Free Custom Automation Ideas for your Business

Connect with Us:

• Join our Community
• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Transcript

Micah Johnson (00:01)
If your 2026 plan is packed, you're not being ambitious, you might just be confused. And in this episode, Alane and I are gonna talk about why we actually deleted 50 % of our 2026 goals so that we could be focused and achieve a lot more than having this giant plan.

Alane Boyd (00:23)
I absolutely loved Micah when we started deleting stuff from our 2026 plan when we were doing our exec meeting with our team. Did you?

Micah Johnson (00:31)
I hated it.

well, was my intent to... All right, so let's back up a step. We have not done this in the past.

Alane Boyd (00:41)
We've done planning, but not like a year focus at the beginning of the year. And actually this started getting put together at the end of 2025, but this was the first time that we did it at the beginning of the year for the year. And we didn't do it more like randomly throughout the year that we were doing plans. Cause we had plans and we would put things in place, but not a year focus.

Micah Johnson (01:03)
Yeah, and I would say we have never gone through and deleted most of our stuff.

Alane Boyd (01:07)
No,

no. To lead things in my history, no way. More is better. Acelane!

Micah Johnson (01:12)
Right. And so that's why at

first I was like, Oh, know the intent is to hone this, but I didn't want to say it out loud while we were in the meeting because I was like, Oh, I don't know that I'm comfortable with getting rid of all of these ideas that we work so hard to put down. But for context, we put all of our ideas on the table and then we went, Hey, this is all the stuff that we should complete for 2026. And then we.

Alane Boyd (01:22)
Okay.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (01:42)
as a team went through and deleted, I think even more than 50%.

Alane Boyd (01:47)
We probably did. And I'll tell you what the moment for me was, is we were going through a part of it and I saw one of the bullets that we had and I started listing for that one thing, how many things needed to happen to make that one thing happen. And I'm like, hold on, like, we're, there were only so many people.

And even though our few, our plan is to do this and then have agents do it because we, do that for ourselves, but we still have to get that workflow happening or whatever that process is. And I'm like, there's just no way this, this could be done in 2027. Like we have a phased approach we need. And so that really was just like this big moment for me where we do have big plans, but we, we have, there's absolutely a stepping block in making that happen.

Micah Johnson (02:42)
Yeah, and while we were deciding what to delete, by the end of it, I did feel really good about it. And the reason I felt so good about it, kind of reflecting back on it, is that we cut out the shit that doesn't matter. It matters, but it matters less than what we left in. And so while all that other stuff would be awesome,

Alane Boyd (03:05)
Yeah.

Micah Johnson (03:06)
What it forced us to do was get so focused that we could look at it exactly and go, we are building this for this audience in this way, with this business model, with this revenue concept, like whatever it is, we can look at our plan now is laser focused.

Alane Boyd (03:25)
Yeah, Micah, I want to share a little bit of like tactical stuff of how we did this that I... Yes, some of our secrets. So Micah, this time you've really dabbled in different ways of presenting information. And really, because I don't take information well, I get very overwhelmed. And then there's nothing that I hate more in business than a long meeting. It just infuriates me. And you have taken that feedback.

Micah Johnson (03:30)
And give away all of our secrets. Okay, all right.

Alane Boyd (03:53)
and really developed, I thought this was the best way to work with me. You used gamma and built an outline and you gave it to us ahead of time. Of course, we do the Amazon method because none of us really looked at it. I skimmed it. And then a couple of the other people said, yeah, I kind of skimmed it, but whatever. There was no expectation on your side that we actually dove into it and digested that information. You did a 30 minute block.

and you stuck to that 30 minutes. Thank you. And you went through it and we kind of dove into what questions do we have? And it wasn't solving the problems. We didn't solve problems in that. We took that information, we asked questions, because I was like, wait a minute, and I love being the devil's advocate on stuff. So we did that. And then we got our questions answered. Great. And then we had the idea, I love

ClickUp's annotate, like you upload a image or a PDF and then everybody can add a comment onto it and it creates a task. And so we could further leave our feedback, ideas, questions, like maybe a brainstormed plan of what this could look like. So each of us on the exec team then went in and just dove in and put stuff in there. And then we did a second meeting that I think was an hour long and

Micah Johnson (05:16)
Yeah, and just to clarify,

that was all asynchronous. So we gave a couple days in between the meetings to say, it's your responsibility to go into ClickUp, drop in notes in the PDF so that when we meet all together again, we have everything together. We're not meeting to talk about your ideas.

Alane Boyd (05:19)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Yeah, I loved that. I got to see everybody's comments, kind of ideas we could piggyback off of each other. So, and that took so little time, you for us to go through that with our expert, each of our own expertise, dropping that stuff in. I mean, I think I spent 15 minutes, maybe max, going through that.

Micah Johnson (05:55)
Totally,

totally. You know what I thought was awesome about that too, Alane, that I didn't expect was that people piggybacked on each other's ideas. So you left a comment and then other people on the team would leave their comments, but then they would also leave comments on your comments and vice versa. And it was like threaded comments inside this PD. It was awesome.

Alane Boyd (06:14)
Mm-hmm.

I left comments on my own comments too. No, but I would think about something a few hours later and I'm like, wait, like what if we did this? So anyway, but this is the beauty of using your project management system and the tools that are in there. This was not chaotic. was so with the annotate and leave a comment, puts a pink, it's so cute, a little pink number.

Micah Johnson (06:24)
I don't have anything to say about that.

Alane Boyd (06:46)
right where you left that and you click on it and shows exactly where you were talking about it. I mean, I'm obsessed with it. Okay, so we did that. You got all of everybody's feedback. You updated the deck with stuff and then we had another meeting and I can't remember if that one was 30 minutes or an hour.

Micah Johnson (07:01)
That one was an

hour. I took everybody's feedback and updated the deck completely. And then we spent an hour talking about the updated deck because there were a lot of changes that were made. And this was part of, this was like phase one. We probably knocked out 20 to 30 % of what was originally there. We refined what we kept and we like,

wholesale deleted sections.

Alane Boyd (07:30)
Yeah, and because I could tell, Micah, you were so nervous. like, you want me to delete this? You want me to delete this? Yes, at first and then after you got comfortable. But we did, we created an appendix or something like that at the bottom. You did Micah, so you could.

Micah Johnson (07:43)
I

felt really insecure deleting stuff forever, so I copied the slides and put them at the bottom just in case we needed to reference them again.

Alane Boyd (07:51)
Yeah.

Just in case we hit all of our goals, Q1, we're ready for the next set. We got them already documented. So, you know, that it kept things really clean and it kept us focused in these meetings rather than stuff drags on because everybody wants to leave their two cents in verbally. And that just keeps on cycling through. And then you look at it you're like, my gosh, we barely got anything done. So this process.

Then after the last time, we deleted more stuff, we got more clarity on what we needed to do, because it is that nuance in making things happen that takes the time to achieve the goal. If the goal was easy, then just do it. You don't need to make it this big thing. It's the nuance of achieving that that takes so long.

Micah Johnson (08:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think a really good example for us in this was our marketing initiatives for 2026. We, I originally listed out all the channels and then organic and ads and, you know, the different audiences and all these things. And in this last conversation, we deleted well over 50 % of that. And I wouldn't say deleted, we moved it to the appendix so we could reference it in the future if we needed, I didn't want to lose the ideas, but

Alane Boyd (08:58)
Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, but they're deleted from the plan. They're available if we need them.

Micah Johnson (09:07)
What we're saying is

it's not part of the plan. We're not starting with that. And so what we ended up with, based on all the feedback and the discussion, was very focused. Focused. We're going to try this in this channel. We're going to try this in this channel. We have two channels that we're going to try. The other thing that we did was we added a definition of complete or definition of done. What does it mean?

Alane Boyd (09:29)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (09:36)
to try this in this channel. I could imagine it's something you could imagine it's something, unless we say this is what this means, we'll never be able to be quote unquote done with that.

Alane Boyd (09:38)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And so on this last round, I was so proud of us for doing this is we didn't need to up, we did our process again because we went through, we got a little bit more detailed, got a little more clarity on what we were focused on, but we still need to build a plan to make each one of these happen. We didn't upload the entire Gamma deck PDF to ClickUp.

we only uploaded the two slides that we needed to dig in on for the goals. And I've gone through and a couple of different, like even, think I did some yesterday and then I did some today, but it's because my brain is still working. And I think where we lose things where people are like, I need time to digest it. They say that and they have the intent, but they have nowhere to go and put those things. Now we have a place. And when I had an idea,

Micah Johnson (10:18)
Yes.

Alane Boyd (10:42)
for a partner program, a different way of using the partner program, had an idea today. I was like, I know exactly where I'm gonna go and put that as an annotated comment on the PDF in this section.

Micah Johnson (10:55)
Yeah. So to kind of summarize how, like, I know we're talking about all these different pieces, but what we did was have our grand plan. We cut out, think 50 % or more. think it was more than 50%. And what we're working on through that same strategy is now that we have a really refined objective and we know what it is that we're trying to do. Now we're writing out all that nuance, but it's not one of us is writing out the nuance for everything that we want that.

They think that it should be it's all of us. All of us from our individual perspectives are saying, here's what I think we need to do to achieve that. Not just my perspective, but the actual tasks. Like, do we need landing pages? Do we need more gamma decks? Yeah. What's all this stuff? Because one person cannot just sit there and identify everything that needs to be done. You have a different perspective than I do, as do the other team members.

Alane Boyd (11:37)
Who's our ICP for this campaign?

Micah Johnson (11:54)
So we're executing this again, and we're going to meet a final time to review the action items. That's all the nuance that you were talking about. And if we would have kept our original list of things that we need to do, our action item list would have been just a giant balloon of

Alane Boyd (11:56)
Mm-hmm.

It would have been paralyzing for me. I would have just not been able to get anything done. So in our last meeting that you're referencing, what we'll be doing is, you know, fine tuning the nuance part and then assigning goal ownership. Who is the leader of that goal? Doesn't mean they do 100 % of it. They can build out the plan, tap in whoever on our team to make that happen. And that might be building AI agent for this.

Micah Johnson (12:28)
Yes.

Alane Boyd (12:41)
But we have goal ownership so we know who is going to be responsible for us getting to the finish line.

Micah Johnson (12:48)
Yeah. And that gives us the not just accountability to each other, but clarity on who is doing what. So we're not just sitting around thinking, Mike is going to do that when I'm thinking, Alane's going to do that. And then we get to the end of the quarter, we're like, I thought you were going to

Alane Boyd (13:05)
Yeah, I mean, my second thing outside of a long meeting that infuriates me is other people doing stuff that I was planning on doing. I got this.

Micah Johnson (13:14)
Do you want

to talk a little bit about how we're going to track this as we go through it?

Alane Boyd (13:20)
Yeah, sure. So we, and we did this in the past and we really liked it, which is why I brought it up. But using ClickUp, we can establish goals and the goal can also come from tasks or different things that are part of a list and those can have assignees in the goals. And so what we're going to be doing is on Fridays doing like where we have on our goals, what are our roadblocks so that, you know, we were the owner of our goal.

but we can see, okay, hey, you're roadblocked on this, like, man, I can help you with that. But we're also staying accountable because we've got it in ClickUp. We can see where we're at and we know, hey, we've got this meeting on Friday, it's a 30 minute meeting, guys, this is not a long meeting, that we're doing a check-in and roadblock discussion, but we also have it in ClickUp so we can have those discussions ahead of that meeting too if we have a roadblock.

Micah Johnson (14:12)
For sure. And so what this is going to help us do is say, we've set a really narrow focus for 2026. We've mapped out all the things that we need to do to achieve that focus. We've delegated it across our leadership team for ownership. And now every week, we're checking in on that to say, where are we at? Is this working? Are we stuck? What can we figure out? What can we solve? What did we get wrong? And that's going to allow us to

bob and weave a little bit or flow like a river, whatever analogy you want to put in for this one. But this is the strategy to avoid getting to the end of a month or getting to the end of a quarter and having an shit moment where we didn't talk about it and we didn't realize this wasn't happening. We didn't understand that that was the roadblock. We missed all these things. Now we're for sure going to miss our goal.

Alane Boyd (15:07)
Yeah. And it's so essential. I think about some of the conversations I have outside of our company and, and it's thinking about, well, you know, how do you get a team member using ClickUp? How do you get an exec team member in there? And it's because it's part of the process. And really in our organization, if you have a, if we had a team member that was not utilizing this system and just, even though we've made it very apparent, then that is a toxic person on our team.

Micah Johnson (15:35)
Hunter.

Alane Boyd (15:35)
Like we

have our exec team is fully bought into this as a team and we are using those tools accordingly.

Micah Johnson (15:44)
Yeah, now we've trained and supported everybody so that they feel comfortable in using it. It's not throwing them in the deep end. But if we would have somebody who is adamant about not doing it this way that everybody else has agreed to do it, then we wouldn't be able to work with them.

Alane Boyd (15:47)
Absolutely.

So final thoughts, we use these workflows. Some of this stuff is new. It's either improving something that we've already seen working and we want to continue building on that momentum, or it could be something new we're testing out. And the end goal is to do this manually, get our process down, and then automate it as much as we can with agents. Not everything can be, but we're trying to utilize that as a resource on our team as well.

Micah Johnson (16:30)
Yeah. And I think from my perspective, looking at just operationally, that's another reason why it makes so much sense to start with fewer goals because one goal might have 10 workflows that we want to automate. Each of those workflows has multiple steps, triggers, outputs, and we still have to design and build and test all of those. And so while the one goal can seem limiting and really

Alane Boyd (16:53)
Mm-hmm.

Micah Johnson (16:58)
strong, we just get really good at picking it. We get really good at outlining all of this. And then we have, know we're in our capacity for building all of this, which means our next goal can be just as strong and just as successful.

Alane Boyd (17:11)
Mm-hmm. So let's recap, Micah, just for anybody, know, even if you've already done your 2026 goals, which most of you probably have, is really taking a look at those and you're like, is this really achievable? Getting all of this done. so one would be to look at it and see what you can get out, cut out. The second thing is looking at what you have and seeing if you have the nuance and the details of how that goal is going to be achieved. And that doesn't mean you as in you, your team.

the person responsible, who is going to do this, who knows what needs to be done, and then what is complete and how are you going to.

Micah Johnson (17:48)
Mm-hmm. Beautifully put.