How to Do an Annual Review That Actually Works
The system I use to consistently achieve my goals year after year
For the first 26 years of my life, I failed every New Year’s resolution I set. Then I discovered the annual review.
Over the last four years, I’ve transformed a simple reflection exercise into a powerful system for personal growth and intentional living. My process combines deep reflection on the past year with concrete planning for the future. It's become the highest-impact activity I do all year, consistently helping me achieve my most important goals and helping me figure out what those goals even are in the first place.
When friends ask me how I keep making progress year after year, I share this framework with them. Now I'm sharing it with you.
Whether you're new to annual reviews or looking to enhance your existing practice, this guide will help you reflect meaningfully on 2024 and set yourself up for success in 2025.
Step 1: Reconstruct Your Year
Before we can reflect, we need to remember what actually happened this year. We can do that by going through all our records from this year and dumping all of our notable events and stats into a bulleted list.
Consider questions like:
What trips did you take?
Who did you spend time with?
What were the anecdotes that you never want to forget?
What triggered your emotional highs and lows
Your list should be a mix of biographical and emotional data. An example list might look something like:
Went apple picking
Went on vacation to Taiwan
Had my favorite dumplings ever
Watched 83 movies
Added a new movie to my top 4 of all-time
Fell in love with baking sourdough, made ~20 loaves
Had a panic attack about my movers destroying my coffee cup collection
Bought my new favorite sweater
Etc
To make this list, I recommend going through your
Photo roll
Journal entries
Calendar
Logging apps (Letterboxd for movies, Strava for fitness, etc)
Depending on how detailed you are, this may be the longest part of the whole process. If you don’t have a whole lot of time to do your review, don’t be afraid to cut corners. It’s much better to look at a rough summary of your year and finish your review than fall off while building an incredibly detailed picture. I am very detailed here and spend about 8 hours on this step alone. You do not need to spend that much time.
Our big goal here is to load our entire year into our brains and create a narrative of what happened to ourselves.
Step 2: Feel the Year’s Impact
As you go through your year, keep these questions in mind. You can try bulleting out your answers or write a more narrativizing essay.
How did you grow as a person?
What were your biggest wins?
What were your biggest learnings or realizations?
What do you want to do more of?
What do you want to do less of?
What media did you add to your personal canon?
What were the five best decisions you made this year?
In this phase, we want to determine what the year meant to us.
Step 3: Review Last Year’s Goals
Now it’s time for some accountability. If you did a review last year, go through and reread it. If you set goals, go through each and give yourself a score for each. I say I either achieved a goal ✅, failed to achieve it ❌, or became irrelevant 🤷♂️. Be honest with yourself and use the irrelevant tag sparingly.
Now, count your goals and calculate your goal achievement rate. It’s a simple average, but I remove the irrelevant ones from the equation. You can use the formula:
For example, if you set 23 goals, achieved 12, failed 9, and exclude 2 that became irrelevant, your score would be 57%.
In my opinion the ideal achievement rate is around 70%.
If you achieved close to 70%, stick to the same number and scope for goals this year
Well under 70%? You might want to set fewer, more focused goals
Over 70%? Congrats! Now, challenge yourself with more ambitious targets.
Finally, reflect on why you failed or achieved the goals you did. What helped and what hindered your progress?
What habits, people, routines, or environments supported you in reaching your goals?
What habits, people, routines, or environments prevented you from reaching your goals?
This phase helps you understand your current ability to face challenges and set goals and will direct you to achieve the most you can in the following year.
Step 4: Connect with Your Purpose
Before we dive into specific goals, take some time to reflect on your broader life direction. We want to write down our life’s purpose, principles, and vision.
This is the hardest part of the entire exercise, but it’s the most useful and most rewarding. When I’m able to write down my life’s purpose in a sentence, I feel the most wonderful clarity that I’m on the right track. The last time I did this exercise, I literally started compulsively laughing. I felt a joy erupt out of me that I couldn’t contain.
Once you have your purpose written down, you can use it to test whether your goals or other parts of your life create harmony or friction.
Purpose: What is my reason for being? What is my ultimate goal?
Example (adapted from 2023):
My purpose is to build things while living a life full of adventure and emotional connectedness that maintains my physical fitness. I want to be a polymath entrepreneur worthy of being praised by [insert specific personal hero] and being featured on the [accolade list or podcast of choice].
Principles: What would have to be true about a situation for you not to really care where you worked, what you were doing, or what you were writing/podcasting about?
Example (adapted from 2023):
I’m shipping in public under my own brand.
I’m working at the frontier.
I engage with other people’s work enough that they want to engage in mine.
I live a balanced life where I get to throw myself into great art and travel the world.
I’m surrounded by beauty and my day-to-day environment inspires me.
I have great relationships with the most important people in my life.
I’m exercising regularly.
Vision: What would long-term success look, sound, and feel like? The vision involves focusing on issues that typically reflect or have impact, on multiyear time frames.
Example (also from 2023):
I regularly create new ideas and ship polished work. This work is recognized by my peers and frequently leads to collaboration opportunities such as podcast appearances. I continuously build a network of relationships both wide and deep. I have a strong inner circle, but also the relationships and power to meet and work with my heroes. My net worth allows me to take fun vacations and shape my physical environment to my exact specifications. I have an exercise and nutrition routine that helps me maintain fitness without constant maintenance.
That said, these questions are hard to answer! My tip here is to focus on answering the principles question first. It helps to be more bottom up than top down. Think about what your ideal life looks like concretely and then pull the themes out. Claude/ChatGPT can be a great help synthesizing a concise summary out of a list!
Step 5: Life Area Analysis
I break down my life into eight distinct areas:
Health: Physical and mental well-being
Wealth: How I invest, save, and spend money
Career: Professional growth and satisfaction
Operations: Daily systems and routines (bedtime, chores, etc.)
Relationships: Friendships, family, and SOs
Spaces: Physical environments (Living room, home office, car, etc.)
Experiences: Adventure and novelty
Intellectual: Mental Growth and Learning
These areas cover 95+% of my experience. These may be a good starting point for you, but you may view your life differently. For example, you might want to add a section for Faith or Parenting.
Try to make a list of all the areas you need to cover your life. Once you have your areas
Give each area a health score (1-10)
Rank the areas in order of priority for the new year.
Ask, why did you rank the top 3 the way you did?
For each area, write down what specific problems you have that need solving
I cannot overemphasize the importance of prioritization here. We humans have limited mental and physical bandwidth and can only effectively focus on 2-3 priorities at once. When you write your priorities, realize that only your top couple areas can be on the front burner and the rest will be on the back burner. Trying to accomplish everything all at once is a recipe for burning out by the second week of January!
Step 6: Goal Setting and Action Planning
Finally, it’s time to write our goals for the coming year. When we do so, it’s important that we’re not fantasizing. Instead, we’re planning! We must think about how we want to achieve them and create an action plan to do so.
To write your goals:
Go through each area of your life again. Think about what problems you have and how each area could be improved. Use that as inspiration.
Are there any goals that you feel are missing and don’t belong to any area? If so, you may have an area of your life that you missed.
Write down your goals in a space that you will revisit frequently. Don’t wait till next year’s review to look at them. (I’ve made that mistake before!)
Make an action plan for each goal. Think about how you will achieve each goal!
From my experience, input goals work better than output goals. For example, it’s easier to create an action plan for reading for 5 minutes every day than it is to read 12 books in the year.
Step 7: Give the Year a Name
By now, you’ve thoroughly digested the last year and have a solid plan for the new one. While you have this great perspective, try to summarize the last year in a word or two. You might try something like New Beginnings, Loss, Achievement, Risk Taking, or infinitely many more.
Here are my last few years:
2023: Year of Death (I’m dramatic ok!)
2022: Year of Introspection
2021: Year of Emergence
2020: Year of Foundations
If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, feel free to ask Claude or ChatGPT. If you’ve done a review for multiple years, go ahead and dump all of your reviews into the LLM. Ask it to summarize your year into a single theme. If you want to go even further, you can ask it to create a theme for every year you have a review. You can even ask it to explain how you’ve changed and what kind of narrative arc you’re following. This worked really well for me this year.
This is a new addition to my process, but I’m having a lot of fun with it!
Step 8: Share It With the World
As a final optional step, put all of your findings into a publishable document. Feel free to redact or remove anything that’s too private. Once you’ve put your doc together, share it with friends, share it with me, or publish it on social media. Enjoy the fruits of public accountability! If you want an example, here’s my post reviewing 2022. I was bad and did not write one last year.
Final Thoughts
My process here might seem excessive. I’m sure it is! But for me it’s incredibly worth it. Feel free to steal what you like and throw the rest away. What’s important isn’t following my prescriptions. I make no claim to having the perfect practice! Instead, you want to find a review process that helps bring yourself clarity and come up with a plan to come out swinging on January 1.
My biggest advice is to take your time with it. Don’t try to finish in one sitting. If you don’t have a lot of free time, by all means go quickly. But if you can, try to take more time than you need.
And that concludes the “short version” of my annual review process. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll try to expand on them in a future post.
I’m currently in the middle of my first annual review retreat and traveling to Sedona, AZ to do my reflections away from the world. I can’t wait to see how my process evolves as I take a little time to get out of my daily routines.
If you enjoyed this post or my recent gift guide, you may enjoy my upcoming newsletter relaunch in 2025. I plan on revamping everything about it. In fact, that’s one of the things I need to figure out at my retreat. But before then, stay tuned for my upcoming 2024 Annual Review.
Happy holidays and good luck reviewing!
-Connor