I love taking time at the end of the year to pause, breathe, and try to make sense of what I’ve experienced over the past 12 months. Obviously, this could, and probably should, be done during any time of the year but without fetishizing the turning of the yearly calendar too much I think December is as good a time as any.
First, I’m going to look at all the various sources of data I collected over the year. For me, that means the things that I capture on my Personal Metrics Spreadsheet every Sunday as well as other passive sources of data collection. Some of these are things I’ve deliberately collected over the past year, like my body weight and sleep data. However, there are lots of ways to generate data over the course of a year that probably don’t seem like data at all. Things like, all the photos you’ve taken over the year, or Screen Time data passively collected by your iPhone, your Amazon orders, the digital books sitting on your iPad or Kindle, etc. I think it’s super helpful to start with whatever data you have access to at the beginning of any kind of retrospective. Overall, I’ll probably end up reviewing some combination of the following data:
Sleep metrics
Body metrics (weight & heart rate)
Steps and running/walking distance
Meditation sessions & duration
iPhone usage
Journal entries
Video games played
Books read
Music listened to
Photos taken
Flights taken
Articles published
Purchases made
Previous calendar events
Podcasts listened to
New experiences (personal & professional)
As I go through all of these data sources I’m going to be asking things like:
Is there a pattern or theme here?
How does this compare to previous years?
What am I noticing?
What’s surprising me?
What’s not surprising me?
And as I review this data I’m going to be keeping a separate list called, “Steering for 2020.” Basically, anything that comes to mind about how I want 2020 to be different from 2019 will get captured on this list. By putting something on the list I’m not mandating that I’m going to do it — only that I’m putting it up for consideration.
Once I review everything I can from 2019, which I’m expecting to take several days to do, I’m going to let it sit in my brain for a couple days without thinking about it deliberately. I want to give myself time to make sense of the patterns and themes that maybe weren’t obvious at first glance. Once I’ve let everything stew in my brain for a couple days I’m going to review my “Steering for 2020” document, add anything that seems to be missing, remove things I no longer want to consider doing, and do some stream of consciousness writing about my yearly theme for 2020.
My yearly theme is designed to help me take whatever I learned or experienced in 2019 and use it to help me have a better 2020 without getting bogged down in highly specific resolutions that inevitably lose their luster after a few weeks. A theme is meant to be a relatively nebulous and amorphous lens through which I can filter many different types of decisions and situations over the next year — with the ultimate goal of helping me live better and more deliberately. I already have an idea of what I think my 2020 theme might be, but it’s always possible that I’ll land on something else as I go through this review process. And even if I don’t, then I’ll have a bunch more data and a deeper understanding about why the theme I’m thinking about feels like the right one for 2020.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about some specific aspects and insights from my own review process as a way to keep myself accountable to actually getting it done and to give you a peek behind the curtain of how one person does it.
This whole approach to reviewing my previous year is very much a work in progress and I’m always taking inspiration from the way other people approach it so please don’t hesitate to share your own system or point me to other bits of writing that you’ve found helpful.
I write a free newsletter about the deliberate cultivation of attention in a complex world. It’s called The Deliberate and if you like things like yearly reviews, themes, and the quest to live “better” then I think you might like it. Subscribe or check out the archive.