9 Grid Goal Chart: How to Turn One Goal Into 64 Actions

Most goals die in the gap between the wish and the Tuesday. You write "get healthy" or "start my own business" on the first page of a new year, it feels wonderful, and then Tuesday arrives with its emails and its dishes, and nothing on the list tells you what to actually do before lunch. The 9 grid goal chart exists to close that gap. It takes one big goal and breaks it, on a single sheet, into sixty-four actions small enough to do today.

Where the 9 grid goal chart comes from

The chart comes from Japan. The designer Hiroaki Imaizumi created a nine-by-nine thinking chart he called the Mandal-Art in 1979, and the teacher and coach Takashi Harada later built a 64-square goal version of it into his Harada Method, which has been used in Japanese schools, sports teams and companies. You will see it called a mandala chart, a lotus chart, a 9x9 grid or simply a goal map. The idea is the same in all of them: nothing big happens unless the small things around it happen first.

How the grid is built

Picture a square divided into nine blocks, and each block divided into nine squares. That is 81 squares in all:

• 1 big goal in the very centre.
• 8 support goals around it: the eight things that must be true for the big goal to happen.
• 64 small actions: each support goal moves to the middle of its own outer block and gets eight actions around it.

1 + 8 + 64 = 81. Every square has a job, and every action on the outside traces back, through its support, to the goal in the middle.

Step 1: Write one big goal you could prove

Write one goal in the centre square, and write it so that a stranger could check whether you did it. "Get fit" cannot be proved. "Run 5 km without stopping by 30 September" can. "Start a business" is a wish; "open my online shop and make the first ten sales" is a goal.

Just one. The chart is built on the idea that a year has room for one big thing done properly, not seven done halfway. If you are struggling to choose, a wheel of life assessment or an ikigai list will usually show you which goal matters most.

Step 2: Choose the eight supports

Around the centre, write eight things that must be true for the goal to happen. The mistake most people make is to write eight skills. Skills matter, but goals usually fail for other reasons: no time, no money, no sleep, no one to ask. Our planner suggests eight areas as a starting point, and you can cross any of them out:

1. Skill: what you need to learn.
2. Body: sleep, movement, energy.
3. Money: what it costs, and where that comes from.
4. Mindset: the belief that will get in the way.
5. Habits: what you will do on autopilot.
6. People: who can teach, test or cheer.
7. Tools or place: what you need to have, and where you will work.
8. Rest: because a goal pursued without rest becomes a goal abandoned in May.

Each support should be something you can influence this year. If two of them say the same thing, merge them and use the square for something else.

Step 3: Break every support into eight small actions

Now each support moves into the middle of its own outer block, and gets eight small actions around it. This is where the chart earns its keep. The rule is simple: each action should take between five and twenty minutes. If an action takes longer, split it in two.

Write actions as behaviours, not results. "Walk 15 minutes after dinner" is an action. "Be fit" is a result, and you cannot do a result.

A worked example

Say the big goal is to open a small online shop. One of the eight supports is a skill: learn product photos. Here are its eight actions, taken from the example page in our planner:

• Watch one 10-minute lighting video
• Photograph one product from 5 angles
• Edit one photo start to finish
• Copy the style of a shop I admire
• Clear and light the table top
• Ask one person which photo is better
• Write down my three camera settings
• Reshoot last week's worst photo

None of these is hard. Any of them could be done tonight. Together, and repeated, they turn someone who takes blurry photos into someone whose shop looks trustworthy. That is the whole philosophy of the chart in one block: sixty-four small things, done often, are one big thing.

Step 4: Tick, repeat, and let the habits take over

Tick a square the first time you do it. Some actions are one-offs; others, like "walk 15 minutes", are worth doing all year. When an action becomes something you repeat, move it into a habit tracker so the grid stays a map, not a to-do list.

Why eight supports is the magic number

Eight is enough to cover the whole of a life and not so many that you drown. It forces you to think beyond the obvious skill and plan for the body, the money and the rest that a goal will quietly demand. And because the supports sit in a ring around the goal, you can see at a glance which side of your life is carrying the weight and which has been forgotten.

Common mistakes with the 9 grid goal chart

• A goal too vague to finish. If you cannot tell when it is done, you will never feel you are getting closer.
• Eight skills, zero support. Plan for sleep, money and people, not only for learning.
• Actions that are really projects. "Build a website" is not a twenty-minute action. "Choose three shop names and ask two friends" is.
• Filling it in once and never looking again. The chart is a map for the whole year. Look at it every week.
• Pushing all eight at once. Three at a time is plenty. Keep the others ticking over with a tiny daily action, and pause any that must wait.

From the grid to the week

A chart on its own is still a wish. What makes it work is carrying it into the week. In our planner, each of the eight supports gets its own goal ladder, with milestones for each quarter, a small finishable goal for each month, a weekly habit and a daily ten-minute action. Each quarter you choose three ladders to push. And each week, the right-hand page asks for the small steps from your ladders, ten minutes each. That is how 64 squares on a page become a year you can see.

If you want to try it on a blank sheet of paper first, please do. If you would rather have the grid printed across four pages with room to write, and the ladders and weekly pages already joined to it, that is exactly what The Life I'm Building is. There is also an undated edition if you want to start on any Monday.

Frequently asked questions