The last two weeks of 2023, and I’m SO ready for Christmas parties, mulled wine, and just enjoying an 11-day-long uninterrupted break!
On a large scale, 2023 was a pretty good year. Looking back at my goal sheet, I’ve achieved roughly 80% of my goals. But this hasn’t always been the case.
In previous years, I achieved only 20% or 50% of my goals at best. Does this resonate with you? Do you often end the year with a bit of dread or ambiguous feelings about how the year went, wishing you had achieved more?
If that’s the case, let me share with you how I went from ending the years disappointed to now feeling content.
A few years ago, I identified the culprit of not being able to achieve goals: a meta-mistake, something I wrote about in a previous post, was that I didn’t learn from my past, resulting in me repeating similar mistakes throughout the years without being aware of it.
And I wasted so much time because of that!
Here are two mistakes I’ve repeated for a long time: Having an inspiring goal but not sufficiently breaking it down into smaller chunks, and being too much in my head, overthinking things instead of just starting to make small steps while adjusting in the process.
For many years, I had a hunch I was doing something wrong but just ignored this.
So at one point, I thought: How can I change this once and for all? How can I consistently make the next year better than the year before, even by just 1%? The answer was simple, but not easy: I had to identify exactly where the problems and challenges lie, so I could make adjustments.
I knew I had to stop putting blame on external factors, even though these existed, and start looking inward. The true challenges lie within myself. Like everyone else, I had weaknesses and blind spots that kept me from being more successful next year.
But how do you pinpoint these weaknesses and blind spots? I figured that the best way was to systematically review my past year. So I designed this year-end review template to make the process easy.
This Christmas, I want to give you free access to this year-end review template. You can download it here for a limited time until January 2024. There are two sheets that you can staple or tape together.
This review template is actually part of a larger, more comprehensive system which I covered in my book “Multiple Careers–Quit the Rat Race, Pursue Fulfilling Work”. But for now, let’s just focus on the year-end review.
This is how it works:
- The template is divided into different areas of your life, including family, career, finances, etc. This allows you to be more holistic and review your life as a whole.
- In each area, note down your successes and highlights on one hand, and your failures and blind spots on the other. If you can, do this for each month in 2023. If you don’t remember the exact month, it doesn’t matter. The goal is to split your review into months just to give you a sense of time and how well you used it.
- Under successes and highlights, note achievements you’re proud of, things that went well, things that made you happy and fulfilled. For me, that was being consistent in uploading to YouTube, which resulted in surpassing my Ad revenue target by over 30%.
- Under failures and blind spots: Note down goals you didn’t achieve, what didn’t go as well, mistakes you made, and weaknesses you identified that led to this. Continue on the backside if there’s not enough space. One thing that didn’t work out as well for me was that I didn’t get as far as I wanted with my story idea. I underestimated the time needed and relied on the weekends to work on this. Next year, I know that to make progress with this, I’ll have to spend some time on it during the work week and reduce time spent on other less important tasks.
- In the last column, summarize the key points. That will be the gist of what worked well and what you need to improve.
I’ve been doing this year-end reviewing routine for several years now, and it’s always been so cathartic. Each time I do it, I’m getting rid of all these ambiguous feelings about the past year. I know exactly what to change in the coming year.
For me, it’s the following: What you prioritize is what gets done, and this year my priorities weren’t always right. Next year, I need to be better at prioritizing so I’ll achieve the things that truly matter to me.
“You have to know the past to understand the present.” ― Carl Sagan
