How to Create a Life Review Structure to Progress Towards Your Goals
For Maximum Clarity and Focus
Reviews are a time-tested and a proven method to help people progress towards their goals. We do this at work with performance reviews, why not do the same with your own life? Albeit, it could be more intimidating than a regular performance review. You are reviewing your life after all.
At work, we have an abundance of indicators that tell us if we are doing well. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are examples of this. We can sit down with our bosses and literally get a glimpse of how well we are doing based on these indicators. Life isn’t that simple, it isn’t simple enough to just be measured by a few indicators.
It’s complex, made up of many abstract indicators. Not to mention, those indicators may change over the course of one’s life. It isn’t so simple as to make a few KPIs and work towards them.
But, it is still a great tool to help bring awareness to your own life. Even if our own markers of progress change over time, it still gives us a rough direction in life. I rather have a rough direction rather than feeling lost. I think the most powerful aspect of reviews is that it gives you a sense of control over your own life.
But with something as abstract as reviewing one’s own life, how do you go about doing so? That is what I aim to address.
How To Review Your Life
Currently, if you type “ how to do a life review” into your favorite search engine (mine is Google), you will be bombarded with the many review templates that are full of questions and prompts.
It is a good place to start but it is also very overwhelming if you are doing this for the first time in your life. There are possibly a million ways in which you can review your life and it doesn’t help when everyone has their own template for you to use.
For me, I felt like I was missing out by just choosing one, so I combined them all and made a ridiculously long question page for myself. That is something I do not recommend anyone to do.
After painfully using that long question sheet for 6 months, I have a different opinion. I think life reviews should be built on principles. Specifically, your core principles in life.
Life reviews should help you see how you are progressing in life regarding your specific goals and interests. Something no single review template can answer.
The only solution is to build your own review template custom to your own life. Which as scary as it sounds, is actually much simpler than we think. I am gonna walk you through how to make one of your own with mine as an example.
But before that, I think it’s important to first define what our motivation for doing these reviews are. Like I mentioned at the start, for reviews really work, there needs to be a direction.
To me, this direction comes in two forms. My goals and identity (which for aesthetic purposes) I have named Life Compass and Life Story respectively. So get out a pen and a paper or your favorite text editor and let’s look at each one in detail.
Life Compass
We all have some aspiration of what an ideal life is like. It could be a better job, a bigger house, being less stressed, etc. Whatever it is, write it down.
Words on paper (or screen) take the abstraction of thought away and solidifies it into something you can read. It forces you to articulate and be clear on what it is you think your ideal life is. That is why I am a strong believer in writing them down, even if those goals change later in life.
It is also why I chose Life Compass as the name because the needle pointing north changes direction all the time but that doesn't mean you stop following it.
So, write down every goal regardless of how silly you think it is. A good method that I have found is to set a timer for 10 minutes and write down every single goal you can think of.
After that, I would organize them by their similarities. For reference, here are some of the things I wrote down and organised.
This isn’t something you want to rush. The 10 minutes exercise is to just get you started. You’d likely want to spend a couple of days really thinking it through.
Try to be as specific as you can. The more specific you are, the easier it will be to work towards them. These goals mark the very reason you want to be reviewing your life.
Then, we can start looking at the ideal identity. In other words, your life story.
Life Story
While the Life Compass shows us our ideal life, the Life Story section shows us our ideal identity.
I find that there are traits in people around me that I want to adopt better. I use this page to write down and capture all of those traits that resonate the best with me.
Now, this can get very abstract but the point is to solidify the kind of person you want to be. The kind of information that you think represents your ideal identity or your ideal self.
This may mean keeping quotes from people or being clear on what it is you think your ideal self should be. This is a snippet of my Life Story.
With our overall life direction sorted and solidified. We can then take a look at the review structure that will help move us towards these goals.
The Review Structure
Now that we have our goals and ideal identity, we can use reviews as a way to check in on ourselves.
There are two things that I think make up a good review structure.
- Consistency
- Reflection and Planning
Consistency
Reviews when done consistently provide the most benefit. Reviewing your life every once in a while is good but to truly reap the benefits of reviews, it should be done consistently.
This actually just means that you have to pick a review frequency and stick with it. Choose a review frequency that you know helps you stay consistent.
Popular choices are daily, weekly, monthly, and annually or even all 4.
The review frequency that I use is inspired by August Bradley in his PPV System which follows the philosophy of frequent reviews.
That means reviews are kept short but done are frequently as opposed to having longer reviews but done less frequently. Personally, frequent shorter reviews help me stay consistent.
The intervals I use are daily, weekly, monthly, and Annual Reviews. Each review taking up more time as the spacings are increased.
For me, this means :
- Daily Review takes 5 minutes
- Weekly Review takes 10 minutes
- Monthly Review takes 15–20 minutes
- Annual Review takes 1–2 hours
Each review also feeds data into a higher review period. This is what that looks like from a data standpoint :
With your review frequency chosen, we can look at the specifics of the review process.
Reflection and Planning
In any review whether it is daily or annually, they all share one thing in common. All reviews have a section for self-reflection of the past and future planning.
It boils down to three simple questions:
What went went wrong before this review
What went well before this review
What can you do in the future to fix what went wrong and keep what went well?
Life gets messy and this cyclic process helps implement re-thinking and planning too. It makes you aware of what has been working well and what hasn’t.
My review process is then just a more granular approach to answering those three main questions and I have broken it down into 4 parts.
1. Reflect on the past
First, I review my past “performance” which are just some things that I track daily. For me, I track my sleep hours, habits, and various summaries of the day.
This is the same regardless of which review period I am in. If it’s daily, I reflect on what I did for the day, if it’s weekly, I reflect on what I did for the days in the week, and so on.
I use Notion to help me with this because it lets me see my past “performance” very easily and is useful for Weekly/Monthly/Annual reviews.
Then I would write down what I think went well, what I think didn’t go so well and what I learned for the week.
Then, I move on to planning for the future.
2. Plan for the future
From my past “performance”, I normally have an insight about how I should be tackling my next day/week/month. Specifically, this just means I write down anything I think I should be focusing on before the next review period.
It could be as simple as “get more sleep” to as complex as “Try out this new productivity system to help fix your inconsistent habits”.
The main point with planning for the future is to be aware of what obstacles you faced in the past. It also allows you to try and account for that obstacle if it shows up again. More importantly, it shows your behavioral pattern over time.
I keep planning for the future, review period specific. Meaning if I am doing a daily review, I would be planning for the next day, not the next week.
For my weekly and daily reviews, the process ends there. As we all know that our goals change over time, I think it’s important to dedicate some time to review those too. That is what I do in my monthly and annual reviews.
3. Reflect and Review Current Life Direction and Identity (For Monthly Reviews)
Monthly reviews take a little bit longer for me because I carve out some time to reflect on my current direction and identity in life. This just means I do a thorough read-through of what I wrong in my Life Compass and Life Story.
I find it important to check in on the two pages and make sure it is up to date. Because it is a higher-level view of my life, I don’t find the need to view them in my daily/weekly reviews.
This helps me stay on track and ensures that my reviews are still nudging me in the right direction.
But because the process of reviews itself can change depending on our goals, I also think it is important to dedicate some time to reflect on your overall review process. It shouldn’t be done frequently, which is why I only set aside this time in annual reviews.
4. Overhaul (For Annual Reviews)
Annual reviews are usually where I make major changes to my review system and life goals if needed.
but before that, I first want to understand how my current life direction fits in with last year’s life direction.
To do this, I would make a new Life Story and Life Compass without referencing the old one. Then, I would compare the two and take in what I think truly resonates with me.
With this new life direction, I then take a look at my current review structure and make any needed changes.
Annual reviews take longer than any of the other reviews combined because I think it is important to really reflect on the entire system. It has become a ritual to me and I associated it with an annual spring cleaning of my review system.
Final Thoughts
There are a lot of resources out there on life reviews, many of them are useful as stepping stones to building your own. But, I also find that many don’t explain the philosophy or intention of reviews in the first place.
I hope that I have shown the intention of reviews and why everyone should have their own review process.
If you’d like the Notion template of this review system, you can get it for free here.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for reading.
