Your Year-End Review

If you are lucky enough not to have had a major year-end deadline, you likely had a few quieter hours or days in which to reflect on the year gone by. What did you discover?

If you haven’t yet carved out this time for reflection, it isn’t too late to do it now.

The Power of Reflection

Why bother? Knowledge Management 101 teaches us that it is only through the act of reflection that you are able to extract from an experience the lessons that can make your life easier and better. Without this reflection, you are forced to rely on imperfect memory and hope that it will deliver to you the necessary prior learning before you make a critical mistake. In this age of distraction, our ability to consolidate and retrieve key memories is less reliable. So why risk it?

Instead, you can can invest a few minutes now to de-risk the new year.

Future You will be grateful.

Questions to Ask Yourself

If you can carve out 30 minutes (6 minutes per question), conduct your own “Year in Review” by writing down your answers to the following questions:

• What worked in 2023?
• What didn’t work in 2023?
• What did I learn in 2023?
• What do I want more of in 2024?
• What do I want less of in 2024?

A Review with a Twist

So far so good. In fact, so far, so traditional. But here’s the catch — all too often, we are told to do a year-end review like this regarding our work lives. But ideally, our lives should encompass more than work. After all, no one ever said on their deathbed: “I wish I spent more time in the office.”

So here’s the upgraded whole-life version of the year-end review that I’d recommend to you. Ask the same five questions written above, but focus on the four following areas of your life:

• Your inner well-being: your sense of being grounded, centered, spiritually fulfilled, able to meet life’s challenges with equanimity.
• Your physical well-being: is your biological age equal to or less than your chronological age?
• Your social well-being: how connected are you to family and friends?
• Your professional well-being: your ability to grow and thrive at work.

Insight + Action = a Better Life

The point of this review is to gain new understanding about your life and then use that understanding to improve your next year. So once you’ve completed the exercise, go back and read your answers. What insights emerge? What changes do they encourage you to make?

To derive the maximum benefit from the review, identify one concrete action you can take in each area of your life to meaningfully improve it. Write down those four actions and commit to working on them this week. Then, as you go through your own quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning process, revisit those commitments. Which actions are complete? What’s left to be done? Where are you ready to move on to the next step?

Reasonable diligence with this process should result in a wonderfully rewarding year-end review in December 2024. That’s my wish for both of us.

Good-bye 2023. Hello 2024!

[Photo Credit: Sixteen Miles Out]