How to Do Your Personal Annual Review
Bring structure and clarity into your life in 2023
Hello friends, we are two weeks into 2023. How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions? ;)
While I typically recommend not using the beginning of a calendar year to start an activity or try to adopt a new habit, there is a certain magic to the change of the calendar year. One year is not too short of a period and neither it is too long. It is long enough to make significant progress in different areas of your life — 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days. It is also short enough to make our plans and intentions specific, wrap things up and if necessary, change course.
It marks the end of one full year of your life. A kind of closure. At the same time, it brings a promise of a new beginning — a naive thought perhaps, but still. We all see people around us with a little more motivation, and a little more fire as the new year starts. Unfortunately, most of the time, this fire gets extinguished pretty quickly. Life throws at us one challenge after another.
So, in the middle of all that, how can we sustain this early January focus, motivation, and pace to do the things we want to do not only at the beginning of the new year but throughout?
Here is a simple yet powerful activity that you can do at the end of a year to evaluate where you are and chart the way forward. Enter Annual Review of Your Life:
STEP 1. Review the past year, and write down:
- Best of the year — 3–5 main achievements, things you are proud of;
- Worst of the year — 3–5 things (events, people, etc.) we wish had not happened or we had not done;
- Lessons learned — 3–5 things 2022 taught you; biggest surprises,
- Best resources you would recommend to others: best books you have read, best other (podcasts/YouTube channels/authors/any materials), best fun (movies, music, food, travel, purchase, etc.);
If this is the first time you are doing an annual review, I would recommend you go a little further back and quickly review the last five years of your life — that would be 2018 to 2022. Write down:
- The most important thing for each year for you — something you did, or something that happened to you;
- One key accomplishment for each year;
- Attach a brief label to each year;
- Anything else you want to highlight, whatever is important for you
Step 1 is not going to take a crazy amount of time. I recommend allocating a maximum of an hour to write down what comes to your mind. Keep your notes around for the next few days as things will keep popping up in your memory that you will want to add to your review of the past.
You will discover that it is challenging to remember all of the significant things, good or bad, that happened in your life in the course of 2022 or earlier. So feel free to go through your calendar, notes, and journals. A fun way to do this is to go through the photos on your phone.
Sometimes we might feel like we don’t need to do a review and instead want to jump straight into planning the next year. Do not make this mistake. Taking stock is important. It tells you what worked and what did not, what you want to continue doing, and what you might want to cut down on. It is important to celebrate the wins, however small, and learn from the mistakes.
STEP 2 — Make a list of your main questions — a maximum of 12
This is a version of Richard Feynman’s approach. Feynman had a list of his ‘favorite problems’ which served as filters to guide his curiosity and navigate the information he came across. Here is a quote from Feynman himself: “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while, there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
Think of the problems you are trying to resolve in your life. These could be personal or professional issues, things you want to fix, learn or improve. It could be something related to your health, your relationships, or your finances. Formulate the questions as follows: How can I …?, What can I do to…? focusing on what you can do yourself to figure something out or advance towards an objective.
These questions will help you decide what to allocate your time, attention, and energy to, moving your closer to crystallize your purpose or purposes. You can also use these questions to organize your physical and digital information (check out Tiago Forte’s approach to 12 favorite problems here).
Again, you may blitz through step 2 if you have clarity on what are the issues that you want to or have to focus on in your life. But keep the list of your questions handy, don’t be surprised if your mind keeps coming back to them. You will most likely be rewriting the questions a few times until you are satisfied.
STEP 3 — Looking forward — 2023
All right. Taking stock is done. Time to look ahead. Now is the time to use your main questions to guide you in formulating the key projects that you will undertake in the course of the year in the following areas (feel free to change the list as you see fit):
- Health/Exercising
- Personal life/Family/Relationships
- Work/Business/Career
- Finances/Home
- Interests/Learning/Reading
- Anything else that is a key area in your life
Identify your projects for each of these areas. You will probably end up with several projects under every heading. Up to you how many projects you want to have, though anything over 15–20 or perhaps 25 becomes difficult to manage. Make sure you mark 5 to 7 as absolute priorities.
Deal with projects however you will, but there are at least two things you have to do:
a) to borrow from David Allen (author of Getting Things Done, see my article on this book here) make sure to identify the very next action for each project. Make it as specific as possible, it is important to identify exactly what it is you need to do to move a project forward. Don’t just be satisfied with an abstract description of something you hope to do at some point.
b) describe what would the project completion look like? Is there a particular way you will measure things? Is it a number, an event, or a completed and shipped product?
Finally, fun planning. Identify one thing — something you always wanted to do, but never got around — and plan to do it in the course of 2023. It could be an activity you will do every once in a while (explore a particular craft or sport for example, or travel to a specific country or a city). For more on this, check out the Someday/maybe list from David Allen’s GTD system.
And that is it.
A word of caution — just having a plan does not mean you will stay focused on it. Make sure to create systems and processes that help you. I cannot recommend GTD enough. Another excellent support for managing your digital notes would be Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain — check it out.
As a minimum, make sure to:
- Have a reliable note-taking system — somewhere where all the ‘incoming’ goes. Whether it is a notebook and a pen, or one of the digital note-taking systems, does not matter.
- Try to do a Weekly Review (or at least monthly) of how you are doing, whether things are on track, what you need to change, etc. Review your calendar, your tasks, and your projects, always deciding on the next immediate action.
- Using your 12 main questions as the starting point, go over your browser bookmarks, saved files, note-taking apps, desktop files, external hard drives, and e-mail, and try to separate actionable materials — things that help you with your priorities from everything else you might want to delete/throw away or archive. Don’t overdo this and turn into a librarian constantly cataloging what you have — the point is to reach a point where you are not overthinking whether there is something valuable somewhere that you are missing.
- Every once in a while review your fun/future/someday/maybe — whatever you call it for ideas and inspiration.
Here you go. Don’t worry that you did not complete this exercise on January 1. Going through steps 1 to 3 and having the first good draft won’t take more than a couple of hours, maybe a day. After that, give it two weeks to refine what you have. That’s all you need.
We all want a wonderful 2023, but I recognize that the year does not just become wonderful on its own. Sure, some luck would not hurt, but rather than wishing you a wonderful 2023, I wish you make it a wonderful year, whatever challenges life throws at you.
Let’s go.
