Planning 2026 Using the V2MOM Framework

What is a V2MOM

The V2MOM is a planning and goal-setting framework devised by Salesforce’s co-founder, Marc Benioff who took inspiration from Tony Robin’s Rapid Planning Method.

  1. Vision: what do you want to achieve?
  2. Values: what’s important to you?
  3. Methods: how do you get it?
  4. Obstacles: what is preventing you from being successful?
  5. Measures: how do you know you have it?

2026 V2MOM

Creating the V2MOM forced me to think about the whole year. Writing The “Vision” and “Values” section was easy enough. Thinking about “Methods” and “Obstacles” made me go back and cut down on my vision and forced me to be realistic. I really wanted to start game dev this year, but because of my work goals (not mentioned here due to NDA, but in my personal V2MOM document) I realized it would not be possible. I feel good about taking this as a foundational year for art so I can start game dev next year.

I have previosly never been good with new year’s resolutions. I’ll report back at the start of next year if this framework helped in acheiving my goals.

Vision

Professional

  1. Focus on health (physical exercise, diet, sleep) to enable rest of goals.
  2. Drive professional growth in the people I work with so we can deliver more and better, together.
  3. Start work on local AI agent development with ollama.
  4. Enhance understanding of distributed system architecture.
  5. Get back into drawing and animation after a hiatus of 10 years. Share progress on blog.
  6. Build art and animation skills to position myself to start gamedev as a hobby next year.
  7. Read more books (minimum target is 10).

Values

  1. Strive for completion not perfection
  2. Understanding concepts as much as possible, reduce the number of black boxes, however I need to strategically park some known unknowns to tackle later.
  3. Learn in public and have external accountability
  4. Strive to make the team better by sharing learning. It should take less time for the people I teach to get good at something than the time I spent.

Methods

2. Develop the team

Weekly learning touch points: Assign reading material/courses to the team. The team collectively as peers should get into the habit of writing and teaching, have a weekly 45 minute session to share their learning with each other.

3. Read books & watch courses

Books:

Courses

4. Build Consistency in art and writing output

  • 10-30 minute pen and paper doodles on weekdays.
  • 2-3 hours digital drawing on weekends.
  • 1 blog post per month.

5. No coding work on weekends

only do planning and research on weekends. Save creative energy for personal pursuits.

6. Introduce exercise into routine for and maintain a good sleep cycle

  • Aim to go to bed by 11:30 and be up by 6 AM
  • Cardio in morning and strength training in evening 4-5 times per week
  • Completely cut off midnight food orders (already done)

Obstacles

  • Might not be able to keep to a strict schedule. Have trouble turning my brain off at night sometimes one night might cascade to the whole routine being thrown off.

    Mitigation Plan: keep a journal by the bed to jot down ideas to pick up later.

  • The gap between ambition and ability might diminish motivation and willpower.

    Mitigation Plan: be satisfied with “good enough”, while noting down what I would improve in the future, compare yourself only to yourself.

  • Personal goals might suffer because of work goals.

    Mitigation Plan: set hard boundaries, try to maximize work from office to have physical separation.

Measures

  • Each team member also completes atleast 1 book or course by year end.
  • Read though “Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)” by end of May.
  • Complete DDIA, Database Internal and Practical Process Automation by December.
  • 1 blog post every month.
  • Posting art dumps (top 2-3 sketches from the week) every week.