It’s that time for reflecting on the past year and planning for the new year. Many choose to do this through a personal annual review.
A personal annual review is a way to make sense of where you’ve been, so you can better navigate where you’re going.
When done right, it helps you step back, get the big picture, and orient around where you are in your life. You can reveal important life lessons, learn about yourself, and reveal a clearer direction for next year. A quality annual review can also help you to set more meaningful, more achievable New Year’s resolutions.
There are lots of templates and guides for doing an annual review. But many fall short in helping you learn from the past year and turn that into the clarity you need for a better new year.
For a better annual review, you want to make sure that it:
Many annual review processes tell you to look at things like “what went well?”, “what didn’t go well?”, “what were you grateful for?”, “what did you accomplish?”, “how many times did you get out of your comfort zone?, go to the gym?, appreciate the moment?” and other things like this. They also commonly make you break your life down into categories like financial, health, family, career, travel, emotional, mental, spiritual etc.
These can still be useful dimensions, but they are narrow and closed.
Of all the meaningful and significant things that may have happened for you in the last year, you might only be asked to look for your successes and failures. Of all the meaningful and significant communities and groups you spent time around, you might only be asked about your family life. Or, of all the things you valued and prioritized this year, you might only be led to focus on finances or career.
Closed dimensions like this are presumptive. The author of the annual review guide might be assuming that money, or career, or family, or travel, or exercising, or mindfulness is important to you to focus on or optimize. Maybe they are, but what if they aren’t? What about all the other things that are important to you? Are you more than your money, career, successes, failures, or workout routines?
When doing an annual review, you want to review your year through broad and open dimensions of life. These can include things like events, relationships, behaviors, values, identities, and so on.
These kinds of broad and open life dimensions help to ensure that you don’t leave out or miss important factors, and they also allow you to reveal and decide what is actually meaningful and relevant to you.
This can make for a much more personal, valuable, and insightful annual review process.
Many annual review processes instruct you to collect and analyze data. This can include things like how many times you worked out, how often you felt happy or sad, how much money you saved, how many times you meditated, how many hours of sleep you got each night, how many cups of coffee or tea you had, and so on.
The idea is that with enough data about your life, it can somehow reveal insights about how your life works, and you can use that to improve yourself or your life. For example, maybe you’ll reveal that when you drink coffee after 9am, your mood is better in the afternoon. Or if you go to sleep before 10pm, you are more likely to go to the gym in the morning.
The problem is that data like this removes context. When you remove context, it’s really easy for the brain to see arbitrary patterns and come up with false conclusions about how things work. This is dangerous. If you develop a false understanding of how your life works, you won’t be successful at making positive changes in your life, you are more likely to make poor life decisions, and you won’t be able to effectively navigate away from harm and towards what makes sense for you.
To reach genuine insights about your life and to come to a grounded and more truthful understanding of how your life works, you need to engage your natural intelligence.
You can do this by asking yourself quality questions and thought experiments that help you fill in the context of your life in the past year and explore the influences between factors.
Annual reviews often tie into setting life goals for next year, or New Year’s resolutions.
People are more successful with reaching their goals when the goals are intrinsic. These goals emerge from what we care about, and they make sense for our unique life. When we pursue intrinsic goals, we don’t need to rely so much on discipline to be successful. We feel naturally motivated and energized to pursue intrinsic goals.
In contrast, extrinsic goals don’t emerge from the meaningful context of our life, and they don't always make sense for us to pursue. As a result, extrinsic goals can be very difficult or impossible to reach. We may need to rely on lots of discipline, social pressure, or outside incentives to have a chance at success. And if the social pressure or incentives disappear, our motivation disappears too.
Many annual review processes set you up for choosing extrinsic goals. They might ask you things like, ‘what does your ideal life look like next year?’ without helping you ground that into reality. They might have you brainstorm goals instead of help you reveal goals that are personal and authentic to you. They might not give you a process for examining if your goals actually make sense before you start investing time and energy.
When doing your annual review, you want your goals to emerge from your understanding of your life in the past year. Goals that emerge this way are more likely to be meaningful to you, to be intrinsically motivating, and to make sense with the constraints of your life, which will make them more realistic and easier to achieve.
I created a guided process that walks you through an annual review with all 3 essential ingredients.
This inquiry process can be used with any of Inqwire’s compatible apps.
As part of this, I hand-picked 10 forms that help you explore this past year in a productive and valuable way.
All together, it will take about an hour or two to consider all the curated forms, but you can optionally “choose your own adventure” and continue exploring additional forms and related factors.
View more content around how to make sense of the world, and how to create a world that makes sense.