A Year in Review: How to Write a Personal Annual Review and What to Get Out of It

Can you believe it’s only 11 days before 2016?

We’ll be having a long Christmas break at work this year. Apart from the parties, reunions and the long rest, I am also finding myself excited to start working again on my Year in Review project.

Visionboard

It’s a personal project where you write about the things that happened during the year and decide on what you’d like to do for the next year and in the future, if any.

So how do you start your Annual Review?

I started mine in 2008 and over the years and with varying styles and formats, this project evolved into something that includes an Annual Round Up, a Vision Board and a Life List.

The Annual Round Up is where you will write about the things you want to remember that happened during the year, each in just one short phrase or sentence.

You can group the events into categories that mean something to you. For example, mine have categories like major projects, what I learned that year, travels and the things I did for the first time.

It’s easier to do this if you had a journal and a camera that helped you capture the daily happenings. If not, just list down the things you remember that happened this year and start documenting your days going forward.

As you do your round up, you get to relive the happy, the proud and sometimes the painful moments of the year. That will help bring awareness to how you actually lived your life in that year. By writing in short phrases, you also get to review the past years at a glance too.

The Vision Board is a collection of photos that represents (parts of) the future that you want. It can also include photos of a big purchase, an amazing event – of anything that you want to see daily to remind you of what you want in your life.

Japan1You can put yours together in Photoshop and print a page to pin to a corkboard that you can see every day. The soft copy you can use as a desktop wallpaper.

I’ve always read about people getting the exact item (a house, a meeting, some cash) that they put on their vision board. That has never happened to me until last year.

The photo to the right is something I randomly picked to represent Japan years ago. What was I thinking, right? And notice the wrong name Aikibahara, Japan. 😉

Anyway, we were just wandering around the year before, trying out the subway while in Tokyo. We just picked random stations that day and walked around the area following a map to do some sightseeing. Akibahara was actually the last station we planned to visit at that time.

So we walked to where most people were going, crossed the lane to the left, turned right, if I remember correctly.

And then there it was – one great surprise!

 Japan2

How cool is that, right?

Now, for the Life List. It is a bucket list that basically has all the things that you want to do in your lifetime, and you cross them out once done.

You can also write random notes to each item crossed, like the place where you did it and the date. I put some in mine but mostly I only add the year I did it.

The goal is not really to cross out all the things that you put in there, although you should try.

While you can keep this list as serious as you want, I prefer not to restrict myself on what I write – from the important stuff like quitting smoking, which I did, to fun things to do like climbing a tree, which I did too. This is your life and you should decide what to put in it and what to remove as well. However, you have make sure you put at least a couple of your big rocks of life for starters.

Doing this Year in Review project every December showed me a lot of things about myself – how I really engage with others and with life. It’s become easier to see where I was, how things are going, how things could be (in relation to where I want to be and not where other people are).

This kind of self-awareness has helped me become more focused, productive and generally happier than I was the years before. And I sincerely wish that for you, too.

Here’s to a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2016!

Author: King Medina

is an entrepreneur from Lucena City. She's multipassionate and is currently interested in permaculture and bird watching. She enjoys frequent walks in nature, visual arts and life hacks.

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