An effective Yearly Review

Just last week (Jan. 2nd '25) I posted about my Yearly Review and I promised you some more insights on how I do a proper review & preview. Here we go:

A review (to start off with) is a great way to pause a moment, reflect on what has happened to you and to potentially realise if the things that you’ve done and the things that have happened to you, are the things you like to do and happen to you – or that you might prefer some of these things to be different.

Without feeling the need or urge to fully control your entire life, I do support the idea that you can steer or navigate your life in the direction you would like it to go.

How to do so? Here we go:

So, what are the crucial steps when doing a Yearly Review?

First of all, a Yearly Review is not something you just do in 30 or 60 minutes. It’s a process and that might take some time. However, if you do this process efficiently, it does not have to cost too much time and I truly believe it’s quite fun as well.

The idea is simple: you take a number of areas in your life and you ask yourself 3 questions:

-????????? What did not go too well over the last 12 months?

-????????? What did actually go well over the last 12 months?

-????????? What would have been a ‘nice to have’?

Based on the categories you would like to address, you can start with making an overview (either a table in a Word Doc, a Spreadsheet or just on paper – like I do it).

The categories you might want to cover are things like: Work, Relationships (friends or romantic), Family, your Living Situation, Spirituality, your Mental well-being, physical fitness, hobbies or fun activities, Your Happiness (can you even rate that?), Skills, Traveling and something I call ‘Structure’ myself. This last topic is overarching and to me it’s about how I spend my mornings, time I spend/waste on my phone and other related issues. When picking your categories, it’s important to think of the relevant topics to you and your life.

As I mentioned before, you won’t be able to do this entire review in an hour or so. First of all: you are more than welcome to use resources, such as a diary or Calendar, which might help you to collect memories. As you can imagine, this can be a time-consuming process. Furthermore, not everything you can think of will pop into your mind on the first instance you will be working on this.

Personally, I make sure I start with the structure (written on paper) so I have something to fill out. I normally do this about 2 weeks before the year will end, allowing me time to ‘gather’ info, insights and memories. Whenever something pops into my mind I know where to write it down so I will only need to pick a certain moment to structure or order all the information, leading to a clear overview.

Whenever that’s possible, I try to treat myself a nice lunch or dinner whilst doing this part of the review. It’s a moment to celebrate after all so why not do so in a solid setting?

Before I wrote about the 3 questions you can ask yourself. The first two serve as a support to your memory and it lets you realise how well things went and what the things might have been you want to put some extra effort in. The third question will normally lead to a goal within a certain category and that’s exactly the list you are looking for.

Now you've got a list you can work with and focus on. And that's all with the main purpose of avoiding that you get to a moment in your life where you'd think: ''I wish I had done xyz different 10 years ago...''.

Through a solid review across different aspects of your life, you have a structured way to figure out what the areas are in life you might want to approve. That normally should be great motivation to transform this into your goals for the year.

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