Last year I started a new habit of reviewing the past year and looking ahead to the new year. I called this process the “Past Year Review” or “PYR” for short.
I’ll share with you what my review of 2020 looks like below and in future posts, I’ll detail my 2021 plans. But before I do, I want to highlight why I think this is a worthwhile task.
- Reflection – this process reminds me to reflect on the entire year. I do this in several ways as it can be easy to forget things that happened over the course of twelve months unless you have something to trigger your memory.
- One of the best ways that I have found is to go through your camera or cloud photos over the past year. It helps if you can scroll and see the month of when the events happened. I have an Android phone so I use Google Photos and this works particularly well.
- Another trigger I use is my personal and work calendars. This helps to remind me of key meetings and events.
- Gratitude – 2020 was an unprecedented year for many reasons. Obviously, the year of COVID-19 but plenty of other bad things happened. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see all the positive things that happened during the year. This process allowed me to fully appreciate the year in an objective manner.
- Forward Focus – Following this process crystallizes my focus for the coming year because along with the positives that happen there will always be those things that I did not accomplish. I pay particular attention to these things so I can set myself up for success in the coming year.
As you can tell from my journal image above, the positive lines were about double the amount of negative or regret lines. I would not have expected this prior to doing the review which speaks to the value of gratitude #2 as I outlined above.
One of the other key insights for me was in some cases I had a positive because I started something but it became negative because I did not continue the habit or the process. This blog is one specific example, but there were others such as my fitness goals. I had done a good job on exercise and nutrition in the first half of the year but admittedly fell short of my standards towards the back half.
The next step in this process is to plan for success in the coming year. I’ll write about that in another post to come (soon I promise)!