I have a habit at the end of each year of reviewing the year that’s ending and previewing the year ahead. I’ve been doing some flavor of this for many years now, and what I do evolves.
I’ve noticed that we (by which I mean ‘I’, but also perhaps you too) don’t spend much time reflecting; mostly we look ahead. And I (we?) are better informed on our near future if we know what the near past was actually like.
The basic idea is that around Jan 1, sometimes before and sometimes after, I spend some time looking at the last year and getting a sense of where I’ve been, what I enjoyed and didn’t enjoy, how I changed.. and then spend some time thinking about where I want to go in the next year.
Here are some of the tools and practices that help me.
- I love using Dan Cumberland’s How to Do an Annual Review (with Free Guide). Dan’s work at The Meaning Movement is really helpful. This annual review is a regular tool for me, and I also love his resources on finding meaningful work and purpose in life. His Annual Review isn’t specific to a New Year changeover; it’s really just a great “review the last part of my life and look at goals” tool.
- I skim through journals, Commonplace Books, calendars, social media posts, etc to get a sense of what happened along the way.
- I look at my annual reading wrap-ups from The StoryGraph and from Goodreads.
- I use one of my music services to review what I listened to over the last year. This could come from Spotify Wrapped, or Apple Music Replay, or my favorite, last.fm Annual Reports.
- I also spend some time looking over highlights (and challenges) for my wife and my kids.
- I finish working on and posting my 1SecondEveryday video mashup for the year. 1SE is a mobile app that makes it easy to take collect short snapshots of life. I try to post a monthly mashup to my Instagram, and it’s always fun to combine all of those to include a whole year’s worth of memories. While in the moment, I worry about finding a “meaningful enough” video clip, looking back over these videos, it’s the normal everyday moments I cherish recording the most. (Here’s a link to my 2023 video).
- In the weeks around Christmas and New Year, I also rewatch the Lord of the Rings movies, and sometimes add the Hobbit movies into the mix. (It’s not really review, but it’s definitely an end-of-year routine.)
Sometimes it looks like unorganized clusters of stuff.
Sometimes it’s more mindmap-y
Looking forward, I also take that big mindmap and look at how I want it to look in the coming year. I don’t really do resolutions any more, but I do set intentions (e.g. ‘learn video editing’) or targets (‘read 50 books’; ‘deadlift 450lbs’), and I also look for themes – what do I want to learn, or focus on, or say no to?
If I’m keeping a journal of some kind, I like to start a new book to begin the year, and I break in the first page with a quote or a theme. Often, Jan 1 includes this quote:
(I’ve blogged a bit more about this quote.)
pat loughery 