It’s that time of year — time to sit down, and perform your annual review.
It’s time to reflect on what has happened this year, see what you can learn from it, and better prepare yourself for next year.
There is no right or wrong with annual reviews, and doing some kind of review is better than doing none.
Here’s how I do my annual reviews, step-by-step, based on a format I have been using and teaching for over a decade now.
Objectives of Your Annual Review
It’s worth defining at the outset what we want our annual reviews to accomplish.
Some objectives would be:
- Review.
- Reflect on the things you have done, or not done.
- See what you can learn from this review and reflection.
- Keep yourself on-track for your longer-term goals, vision and purpose.
- See if you are living true to your own self-interests, standards and values.
- Prepare yourself for the upcoming year.
When to Perform Your Annual Review
The best time to perform your annual review is during the last two weeks of the year.
For simplicity, any time after December 15 is appropriate.
Why two weeks?
So that you can take your time, and think things through.
You will likely sit down and write for an hour or so each time. You want to be able to space out your thinking and reflection to give yourself time to process and recall.
A Review in Three Parts
There are actually three parts to your annual review:
- The General Review, covered in this article.
- The Bonus Round, also covered in this article.
- Planning for next year, which is not covered in this article but which you can read about here.
The Annual Review Template
Here’s a quick outline of the annual review and bonus round.
Annual review
1. Review Outcomes - Annual and 3-Year. 2. General Review. 3. More General Review based on quarterly and monthly journal entries. 4. Big Things that Happened & What to Take Away from them. 5. Areas of Life Ratings and Comparison. 6. Things to Leave Behind. 7. Things to Take Into Next Year.
Bonus round
* Review Mission and Purpose. * Review Values. * Review Reasons Why. * Review Morning Philosophy. * Review Virtues. * Review Vices. * Update Standards. * Plan for next year. * Implement any inner game from takeaways and newly set outcomes.
How to Perform Your Annual Review
Let’s go through each step of the annual review process.
Your annual review is best done in a journal. This can be digital or handwritten — whichever you prefer, so long as it is easy for you to store and access.
And remember: Don’t rush the review process.
Sit down, get comfortable, and lie back on the couch if you need to. Grab a cup of your favourite beverage and relax.
Then get started.
1. Review your goals and supporting processes/systems
Assuming that you have annual goals or outcomes written down, grab them and look over them.
Did you hit your targets? Were any milestones reached? How did the systems for each of these goals perform?
Simply see what was achieved and what was not. There is no judgement here, no right or wrong.
Just write down what happened for each goal, your thoughts on it and how you feel about it.
Do this for both your annual goals and if you have them, your 3-year goals across your cascading timeframes.
2. Do a general review
Now it’s time to do a general review.
In this step, give yourself the permission to write down whatever comes to mind, unfiltered and unfettered.
Get introspective and get your thoughts down.
Here are some prompting questions:
- Honestly, how did this year go?
- What did you feel?
- What did you experience?
- What did you like?
- What did you not like?
- What did you consider successes or triumphs?
- What did you consider low points or failures?
- What happened in the world, and how did it affect you?
3. General review based on quarterly and monthly journal entries
If you are using the cascading timeframes model and journal entries you will have quarterly and monthly journal entries.
Take a break for a day after the step above, then read over these journal entries and their review sections.
Then add to your general review.
Note down any accomplishments and wins. Note down any major impact events you went through.
You can even break this down month-by-month or quarter-by-quarter if you like.
This step is to cover things you may have missed when you were just writing down your thoughts in the previous step.
4. The big things and takeaways
Up to this step you have been reviewing generally, and now it’s time to be specific.
Pick a few big things that happened this year.
Anywhere between 3-10 major impact events that changed your life significantly.
They could be personal, like a new relationship, the birth of a child or a change in career.
They could also be general, like the 2020 pandemic.
And just write about them — what happened and what would you take away from them?
5. Areas of Life Review
The next step is to specifically review each area of our lives.
The areas are:
- Wealth.
- Health.
- Relationship.
- Family.
- Social.
- Play
- Learning/knowledge/spiritual/evolution.
For each area, give yourself a subjective rating of X/10.
10/10 means you are perfectly happy with the area.
1/10 means you are not happy with it at all.
And then write about each area:
- What did you do or try in the area?
- What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- What do you wish had gone differently?
- What are you going to do differently going forward?
- Do you need to do anything differently going forward?
If you’ve completed an areas of life review in previous years, you can compare your subjective ratings year-to-year to track your progress.
And note that it’s perfectly fine to not have an area move year-to-year if it isn’t one of your big three areas or if it’s in treadmill/ongoing processes mode.
6. Things to leave behind
Now that you have done a general review, looked at your goals, looked at your areas and looked at major events, it’s time to be reflective.
Pick five things that you want to leave behind.
These could be:
- Things you did.
- Inner game structures or attitudes you adopted.
- Things you acquired.
Examples would be habits, people, beliefs or systems.
There is no right or wrong here.
Simply list out five things you don’t want to take with you into next year, and write down why you want to leave them behind.
7. Things to take into next year
Much like in the previous step, pick five things that you liked and want to take with you into next year.
Again, these could be:
- Things you did.
- Inner game or attitudes you adopted.
- Things you acquired.
Examples would be habits, people, beliefs or systems.
And of course, there is no right or wrong here as these are personal to you.
The Annual Review Bonus Round
The seven steps above are the main part of the annual review.
What follows is a “bonus round”, for people who have personal ops documents set up.
In this round you go through, review, and update if needed, each part of your personal ops documents.
They are:
- Your purpose.
- Your core values.
- Your reasons why.
- Your reminders/affirmations/personal philosophy.
- Your list of virtues.
- Your list of vices.
- Your vision of tomorrow.
You should also write a new standards journal entry for the upcoming year.
Simply go through each document, think it over, assess and rewrite or copy over a new version for the upcoming year with any needed changes.
Planning the Upcoming Year
I mentioned that your annual review consists of three parts:
- General Review.
- The Bonus Round.
- Planning for next year.
At this point in the process you can plan your goals for next year, and if you do 3-year planning, update your 3-year goals as well.
There is also one additional important step that you should do:
Do any necessary inner game work based on the takeaways from your annual review, and based on your newly set outcomes for the upcoming year.
This means if you need to change some beliefs, adopt new ones or develop some new behaviours, do so.
This will help you prime your mindset for what lies ahead and give you a running start to the new year.
What To Do Next
Do your annual review.
Do the bonus round.
Then plan for the new year.
Photos by Inside Weather, Liks Digital.