2022 Annual Review
The joy and work required to audit your life
Welcome back everyone! I hope you had a nice holiday. If you’re anything like me, you probably spent your vacation relaxing, visiting family, and working on a bunch of personal projects. I usually take the whole week between Christmas and New Years to relax and catch up on everything going on in my life, but I always fall down a rabbit hole or two. Can’t relax tooooo much.
For the last three years, I’ve performed an annual review. Each year, I’ve iterated on the process and gotten more and more detailed. This year was my most effective yet. My process is a mix of a few sources, mostly Dickie Bush, Anthony Gustin, and David Allen.
The process took much longer than expected. I probably spent about 12 hours working on it, mostly in 2-4 hour chunks. I was ready to spend way more time on it, but life made it hard to get the free time I needed. Next year, I think I might schedule a small two or three day retreat to really focus. At the end of my review this year, I have the clarity that makes it feel worth it to invest deeply in this kind of exercise.
I thought I might share a little bit about my process. My results, what I found valuable, and what didn’t work.
My Process
My first objective is to determine everything I did this year. I start by brain dumping. Month by month, I go through my calendar, all of my photos, and my logging apps. I note who I hung out with, what activities I did, where I traveled, which movies I watched, what games I played, what books I read, etc.
Next, I extract my obvious wins and losses. What’s top of mind? To do so, I break my life down into eight categories: health, wealth, spaces, experiences, intellectual, career, operations, and relationships. For each category, I write as many highlights and lowlights as I can, using my life calendar as inspiration. From there, I start my analysis.
I go back and look at last year’s review. I look at how I performed on my previous goals. I then ask myself a bunch of questions about how I’ve grown and where I feel I’m falling short.
At this point, I had my first big realization: I hadn’t actually looked at my goals for 2022 since January. Despite my negligence, I still achieved 16 of my 37 goals. My first order of business this year is improving my execution to make sure I’m looking at my goals and reminding myself of them constantly. Stay focused.
Next up is my horizon analysis. Here, I look at the big picture in my life. What kind of person do I want to become? This was a new exercise for me, and possibly the most valuable part of the whole experience.
I set out to answer the question, “What is my purpose?” in a sentence or two. This is essentially asking what is my reason for being or what is my ultimate goal. At first, I had no idea what to put down, so I started by writing out anything I could think of that I wanted to achieve in life. Then something incredible happened.
I started to see the threads between the bullet points. I don’t know how it happened, but something clicked into place and the solution to the puzzle revealed itself. The answer stood in front of me, and I wrote down a sentence that summarized everything. I walked away with such clarity. It felt euphoric.
Usually, I’m great at managing projects, but not at making sure those projects align with my broader vision for myself. Previously, I couldn’t easily sum up who I was or what I was trying to accomplish. With my new purpose statement, I felt like a master visionary of my life.
Next, I write down the specific problems in each of the eight categories of my life that are in conflict with my purpose and vision. These problems determine my goals for the upcoming year. This time, I focused on making each of these goals SMART and tried to give each a very clear pass/fail criteria. Instead of “tweet more,” I wrote “tweet on 20 days per month.”
Lastly, I rank each area of my life for how I want to prioritize it going forward. My top four categories for 2023 are Intellectual, Health, Relationships, and Spaces. These aren’t the categories I necessarily value most, but the ones I want to work on next.
My Results
Overall, 2022 was a great year for me with some incredible highs. Compared to 2021, my 2022 day-to-day life was much better and the highs were about the same, but 2022 had significantly lower lows. A substantial knee injury, poor tax preparedness, and one other redacted issue cut deeply this year. Thankfully, I’ve addressed all of those situations and I’m not concerned about them going into 2023. My 2021 problems mostly stemmed from working way too many hours and having terrible work-life balance and I’m happy to say that wasn’t a problem this year.
My biggest failure this year was only half-heartedly building on the success of 2021. In 2021, writing online changed my life. My crypto explainer threads and the Subnet Show took my online presence into the stratosphere. But I lost all of my momentum in the second half of the year. I barely tweeted and decided to step away from the Subnet Show.
Some of the reason for my drop off was lack of inspiration and feeling like I was falling into the trap of becoming who the algorithm wanted me to be. But the the biggest part may have been getting into the habit of not shipping. So my number one goal for this year is to publish something every week. What I publish doesn’t matter. It could be this newsletter, a Twitter thread, a TikTok, whatever. The most important thing is to always be shipping. I’ll also be tweeting at least 20 days per month.
Health wise, I’m almost entirely back from my knee injury. This year’s experiment with weight lifting was a bit of a flop. I exercised all year, but basically peaked in March. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, but poorly timed travel and my knee injury stunted my progress for most of the year. Despite exercising year-round, I still managed to put on some weight and am currently sitting at an all-time high. I also really missed running.
This year, I’m aiming to build more hybrid fitness. Instead of pure power lifting, I’ll be mixing in significant running. I’d like to be in half-marathon shape or better. Running my second marathon this year sounds quite appealing, but it’s quite the time commitment, so I’ll see how I’m feeling mid spring. My main goal for this year is to fully train for and run a race of at least half-marathon distance or an equivalent adventure race like a Tough Mudder.
In 2021, I wanted the theme of 2022 to be my year of relationships. I was having huge success writing online and wanted to use it to help make more internet friends. Also, I had recently gotten engaged and wanted to plan my wedding. Neither of those things happened. In fact, I had totally forgotten about prioritizing it! Well, it’s back on the docket this year, but with much more intention.
Despite my negligence, I’d say I made two good friends last year. They are both great, but I know I can do better. I also need to give myself credit for staying in contact and reconnecting with some old friends. I did one or two zoom calls a month with various faraway friends and those were easily one of the highlights of my year.
In 2023, I’d like to prioritize making friends both online and off. I’d like to rebuild my pipeline for meeting new people and converting acquaintances into friends. The goal this year is five new friends who are not coworkers. (If you’re reading this and think you might want to be one of the five, feel free to reach out!) I also want to prioritize my offline social life by hosting two parties this year. I love hosting, but I haven’t done it consistently. I’m excited to see how it goes!
For the most part, I’m very pleased with the way I’ve setup my house. I have some gripes here and there, but Spaces is my fourth most important category because I’ve started to get into home improvement. I’ve already committed to redoing my laundry room and bedroom closet. I was hoping to have finished the closet project over my Christmas break, but I discovered a few extra problems that needed addressing. My goal for the year is to complete these two projects, hopefully by the end of Q1.
Overall, I have twenty-two goals this year. A few highlights of the rest:
Take two international trips this year, including touring Christmas markets in Germany.
Read 12 books
Book my wedding venue
Order takeout or go to a restaurant no more than 2x per week on average.
Perform quarterly reviews in addition to my weekly and annual reviews.
Nothing seems too crazy, but I think hitting all of them would really make for a fantastic year and bring me a lot closer to my ideal vision. My focus is on execution and keeping these goals top of mind
If you’re at all inspired to perform your own annual review, I highly recommend it! It’s not too late to get started.
A small programming note, I’ve decided to publish this newsletter every other week. Worries over Twitter’s immediate death seem to have subsided, so I’d like to balance publishing here with writing some threads.
As always, thank you so much for the support! I can’t wait to kick butt in 2023.
-Connor
Connor, great read and to learn about your epiphany. What's the final result on your purpose?
Good annual review.
Although 2022 has been a year of persistent undervaluation and emotional turmoil for me, I am going to start over and pick up my annual plans, goals, and life again in 2023.