Your data-informed self-reflection
Using reflection tools and your own data to help you reflect on the past year
Earlier this year I wrote a little piece about shaping the right space for you. It was reflecting on the challenges of that for those I coach, friends, peers and my self.
Many of us struggle to carve out space for ourselves. To think about what we really want. What we really care about. How we really are.
Warning
Tread carefully with some of this. Some of these reflection exercises can be quite risky if we are sensitive to concerns around loneliness, or live with more extreme degrees of depression.
Using the Year Compass as a guide
For the past few years, I have tried to use a free tool called The Year Compass to reflect on the past year and set the direction for the year ahead.
It can take a long time to do. Especially if you choose to do the upfront exercise of going through your calendar for the year. But over multiple sittings I do get value out of persevering with this, as there’s so much your brain can choose to forget. I find myself having to do it in batches with various agreements with my wife. As I write this, I have just been through my calendar — week by week — reflecting on projects I worked on, people I met (easier when most of those is a zoom meeting), people I coached, events I went to, things I did, things that brought me down, things that lifted me up. I’ve been doing this with my weak Roam skills and a Miro board capture that I setup for last year’s reflection.
Whether you choose to use The Year Compass or some other tools for reflecting, I thought i’d share some questions I asked myself and things I have done in previous years that have helped me get perspective on all the things I did and experienced over the past year.
Here are some of the extension questions I asked myself to ground in some actual events:
- Where did you go?
- What memories did I want to share?
- Who did I interact with?
- What memories did I (want to) keep for myself?
Where did you go?
Using the nosiness of Google Timeline (if you dare to be tracked), you can very easily get a sense of where you have been. This year not very far for me, but it reminded me that I did a trip on the broads with my family, did a walk in memory of someone who passed away, and that I didn’t move far away from home — just a few trips into London. Last year was more interesting as I got to go to Interaction 2020 in Milan.
What memories did I want to share?
Going through your Instagram or shared photos, you can get a sense of what you chose to share with the wider world. Various services will give you your top liked photos, but you can have fun just screenshotting some of your own feed for a little reminder.
Who did I interact with?
I find this one the most interesting as it’s easy to forget all the people you might meet in a year. Whether on projects, as check-ins with old acquaintances, or as part of the many groups you can be part of.
If you aren’t doing the calendar inventory, it may help to prompt yourself with the different groupings, for example:
- Projects
- Teams (could be project or org related)
- Events
- Friends
- Family
- Training/course cohorts
- Support networks
- Networking randoms (I don’t call it this, but it’s a grouping of people you meet for more emergent conversations)
I generally do a quick pass on this and then highlight some of those people who have been significant (for good and bad) on me. The Year Compass asks various questions of some of the people in your life, things like:
- Who was in your friendship, family, community
- Who were there three people who influenced you the most?
- Who are the three people you influenced the most?
- What were the best moments?
This year I am considering adding these questions:
- Who inspired or energised me?
- Who brought me down or frustrated me?
- Who supported me?
- Who challenged me?
- Who should I thank or appreciate?
What memories did I (want to) keep for myself?
I know not everyone is on Instagram, or chooses not to share so performatively, but you probably have some of your own photos on your phone, or camera.
One year, I decided to go through my photos from the past year. There were a lot. I’m quite snappy and don’t edit enough. It was a really hard year for me. But something about looking at the photos. The smiles, The activities. The nice weather. Actually made me remember all the good points (and some bad).
These days, my Photos library and my Google Home likes to suggest memories. If you want to shortcut the process, you could go straight to those. But there is some real pleasure, and lasting value, in picking some of your own favourites and reflecting on some of those times.
Other data points you could use
The above questions relate to specific data points I could easily get without racking my brain. Using the power of all this digital technology that is supposed to help us.
But there could be other things you could do if you had time. Here are some of the things I may do, if I have time:
- Go over and group all those screenshots I have taken from various webinars, meetings and workshops
- Catalogue my favourite outputs of the year from my projects
- Check my SLR photos — likely to be bigger photos but better images
- Group and then word cloud my transcripts within Otter from various meetings, webinars etc.
What else could you do? I’d love to hear.
Going beyond the data
I’m not saying that doing all this data harvesting and cataloguing will help you self-reflect by itself. But I have found it very valuable to ground me in what has actually happened. As I said before, the brain has a knack of being selective of what it remembers. For me, it often skews towards the negative.
The deeper work is asking questions around what it means to you. The Year Compass does a great job of this, but I wouldn’t want to be too directive on that here. Different people will get different things from it. Or benefit from different approaches.
All I’d suggest, if you’re open to it, is:
- Carve some time out for yourself
- Do what you can to think about the past year — good and bad — but try to get some objectivity in there. Don’t rely on your memory alone.
- Use that as a basis for thinking about how you might change things up for the year ahead
- In addition to the above, or even instead of (if you realised you’re content), think about what you want to protect, continue or do again.
- Don’t spend too much time on all this — you may have friends and family to see too. If you feel comfortable sharing with them, maybe that would be a nice thing to do.
What about other ways to self-reflect?
There are a number of people I know and have seen who are offering sessions for group self-reflection and visioning over the coming weeks. I’ll try to add them here if I get a chance amongst the food, drink and isolation (yes, COVID positive right now which is crap).
Also, I have a collection of more digital product design and UX focused reflection tools on Medium. My shaping design series has a whole range of grounding, profiling and more tools that are more specific and could be useful to you.
Check them out here (unfortunately not much architecture to them right now which is why I am writing a book and toolkit to make it easier):
I’ll be running some workshops in the new year around the tools, so feel free to follow me:
I write at medium.com/jasonmesut, tweet at https://twitter.com/jasonmesut and can be found on LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect re: coaching, shaping design workshops or consulting topics.
