Are your goals and dreams getting lost in the noise?

Just like every year, when the New Year rolled around, my social media was abuzz with New Year resolutions and goals. Most people use New Year as a marker to plan ahead for the next year but research has consistently shown that more than eighty percent of those plans and resolutions are forgotten within 30 days. I once wrote a post on how to improve goal setting. As I have used goal setting in my own life, I have realized that New Year Resolutions (NYR) and Past Year Reviews (PYR) must go hand in hand to truly improve the outcome.

Past year reviews are more actionable than broad resolutions and can provide a foundation for better goal setting. It shouldn’t take more than 30 to 60 minutes and here is how you do it as per instructions popularized by bestselling author Tim Ferriss:

1. Draw a vertical line in the middle of a piece of paper. Write POSITIVE in the left column and NEGATIVE in the right column.
2. Go through your life log for last year. It can be your calendar or it can be your journal – anything that helps you recall every week of your entire year. Admittedly, this step requires that either you have the habit of keeping a journal or you keep a meticulous calendar. I personally use a journal. If you are not convinced that a journal is a good use of your time, you should read The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. Heck, you can read any self-improvement book and you will discover the benefits of putting pen to the paper regularly. 
3. For each week, jot down the events, activities, commitments or people that led to a peak positive or peak negative emotion and experience. The activity that brought you closer to your goals and aligned to your priorities would have resulted in positive emotions, even if the actual act of doing that activity was painful in that moment. Put everything in the respective positive or negative column.
4. After you have gone through the entire year, review and ask yourself which 20% from each column led to strong peaks.
5. Now that you know the top things in both categories, schedule more of the “positive” leaders for the upcoming year. Book things in advance before some other priorities take up your time. If volunteering at a local children’s hospital gave you a positive peak, schedule more of that activity. If going on vacation with your family gave you a positive peak, plan and book that now. The time you will spend looking forward to a positive emotion activity is immensely powerful and results in a positive mindset. We all know how good it feels to contemplate and look forward to a vacation that you booked six months in advance. You will be springing out of bed every morning like never before when you have positive emotion activities scheduled for the day.
6. Take your “negative” leaders and put them in a place where you can see them frequently and remind yourself that these make you miserable and do not contribute to your life goals. Don’t schedule them out of obligation, guilt or any other reasons. Schedule new experiences to fill the time that is created by removing the negative leaders; these new experiences may become next year’s positive leaders.

That’s it! It’s a simple process and it allows you to fill your next year with activities that are truly meaningful to you, before someone else’s priorities start filling your year.