My Personal Year In Review & How I Do It

In this episode, Brian shares his “year in review” for 2022, the process he uses to create the review, a template so you can try your own, and the steps he follows to automate the reminders to check back in throughout the year(s) to see if you’re still on track.

Link for the full page with all the details, the video, and more, for this episode:
https://www.productivitygladiator.com/episodes/my-year-in-review-heres-how-i-do-it

The Evolution Of My Year-In-Review

Right up front, I admit that I poopoo’d this year-in-review practice for years. In my early career I heard about people doing this “year in review” thing. My thinking back then was “If YOU want to waste all that time reflecting on your year that’s fine, but I’m killing it at work right now so I’m going to keep killing it. I know what I’m doing, no need to reflect.” Looking back, I WAS WRONG.

Looking back now, I think I was wrong for 2 reasons.

1) I was missing that there is a lot of power in making sure you’re headed toward my goals.
I now think there’s real power in stepping back and looking at where you’re headed. In the day to day, I would often get so focused on driving metrics, completing tasks, and working toward goals, that I often lost sight of the big picture, I “couldn’t see the forest for the trees”. This reflection has really helped me to both appreciate just HOW MUCH I’ve accomplished AND reach some important realizations on whether I was really happy with the direction I was headed.

2) I was completely missing the reflection and course correction in my personal life.

Most of the reflection I did was entirely focused on my professional life. Performance reviews at work really facilitate this process. Your “annual performance review” is the time when you can and should do this professionally, and discuss it with your boss since they may have good ideas and further direction you can incorporate. The problem though is that I never gave myself my own personal performance review. My personal life was just “happening” to me, like I was a passenger on that train, not driving it. I missed doing a “performance review” of sorts for my personal life.

Coming around to it took years

For more than a decade of my early career, I never even considered doing my own “year in review”. Then from around 2012 to 2019, my steadfast opposition to the practice slowly started to soften. Each year, the people in the productivity space which I followed and looked up to would talk in their blog posts and podcasts about their “year in review” they’d completed and the realizations they’d had. Over the course of 7 years, hearing these messages each year was enough to slowly shift my thinking from a “this is dumb” idea to a “hmmm, I wonder what would happen if I tried it” idea. Finally, in 2019 I did my first one of these for myself and I can honestly say, I was wrong, I love this practice of reflecting on my personal “year in review”. I also feel like I leveled up my personal life significantly!

I think the power is in differentiating your “personal” from your “professional” Year-In-review.

My year-in-review I’m going to share is entirely my “personal” year-in-review. In all my work now teaching life balance and personal productivity, people often lose sight of the “life” part of their “work-life balance”. I think there’s real power that comes from doing this for yourself, for you as a person, separate from you as a professional.

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What about my hobbies, & side hustles that produce income?

For me, I have a primary job/career that is my primary source of income, but I also have several side hustles. Some of you may probably identify with that. Those side hustles are included in my personal year-in-review, the main job is not. Here’s where I draw the line - if my hobby or side hustle includes an annual performance review, then I do my reflecting for that one during that review. It’s alright if I touch on some of these or mention them in my personal year-in-review, but it shouldn’t be the focus here. Your personal review is on your life and your personal pursuits.

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