How to Review Your Year
Five takeaways:
While New Year’s resolutions are important, it can be equally, if not more important, to sit down and review the things you’ve accomplished throughout a year gone by. What did you achieve? Have you done what you said you were going to do? What are the big and small wins? And most importantly, what have you learned?
Yeong suggests that you ask yourself three questions to adequately assess your year:
- What went well? – List the things that you’ve accomplished in the past 12 months. Take time to scan your memory, making sure that you remember the small wins you’ve collected. Take a moment to be grateful for all of the good things that have happened.
- What went wrong (or not as well)? – Explore the year’s setbacks, whether they are work related, relationship based, or based on missed benchmarks– listing them is therapeutic because you are acknowledging them. As you do so, do not forget that you were able to accomplish a lot of great things alongside- or despite– the things that did not to go plan.
- What needs work? – Honestly answering this question reveals insights from past mistakes and uncover steps you can take to improve next year. This question is not meant to force you to guilt-trip yourself. It is about figuring out how to direct your improvement next year.
Yeong then provides two introspective exercises for assessing your year.
- Turn your experiences into lessons and principles– Use the lists you’ve created in the first steps to form lessons and principles that guide your path forward. If you learned the previous year that counting calories was an effective weight loss technique for you, write down: “calorie deficit is the key to weight loss.” By turning your learnings into mantras, you make them more likely to sink in.
- Rate different areas of your life to reveal hidden insights– Yeong breaks life into six components: work, money, fitness, relationships, learning, and hobbies. In this step, he suggests rating each of these areas of your life on a 1 to 10 scale. This provides clarity regarding parts of your life that provide you more satisfaction than others, or areas that need more diligent attention.
Once you’re done reviewing your year, take a few days to let things sink in. Reward yourself with good time off. Reach out to people who have helped you in the past and thank them.
By productivity and psychology expert Dean Yeong
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