It’s the time of year when we’re all looking ahead and attempting to become our best selves; our ideal future selves. As we face 2019, we begin to envision all the goals we’d like to accomplish. All over social media I keep seeing the “New Year, New Me” mantra and I LOVE it. I know it’s kinda cheesy and cliche, but I greatly appreciate when people spend some time introspecting and dare to dream. It is daring and courageous to dream so I will always support that endeavor. And it irks me that we’ve made it “cool” to mock people who are at least setting intentions to improve themselves. Like ugh, who hurt you? Who hurt all of us?
Anyway, in true contrarian fashion, I often spend this time more focused on my past than the future. I like to do what I call an “In depth Year In Review.” And it’s basically exactly what it sounds like. I simply reflect (and record) what I did the past year. Apparently this type of technique has been popularized by Tim Ferris in what he calls a Past Year Review (PYR). My system has a bit of a different flavor, but it’s essentially the same idea. There are lots of different ways to do this, but I basically sit down and write all the notable things I did each month. For example, in October I took a road trip with my two best friends to Cincinnati, OH and we did a donut tour. Yes, you read that right. DONUT TOUR. 12 donut shops, 80 miles, 3 hours, sooooooo many donuts. We even got a passport that was stamped at each shop. I had a blast! And until I started my “Year In Review” I had kind of already forgotten about the trip. I ended up looking through my phone at all the pictures and videos and I was cracking myself up remembering all the great moments we had. Here’s a couple of my faves!
The focus of this exercise is to celebrate your achievements and reflect on the things that brought you joy. The nice thing about reviewing by month is that mostly big events and moments stick out in your mind. Tim Ferris and others use a more granular week by week assessment, but I ain’t got time for that. I don’t need to rack my brain trying to remember every single little detail. Chances are that if it’s that hard to dig the moment up, it probably wasn’t all that impactful anyway. So I just sit down and mentally picture each month and record what I did. I can also check through my photo galleries on my phone and social media to help jog my memory. The rationale being that if it was important enough at the time to take a photo, I’d likely want to remember it now. If I’m feeling super curious I can also peruse my posts on social media because it may give insight about how I was feeling regarding certain events. Do what works for you.
As I completed this exercise I began to recognize that there’s so much I have to be thankful for. SO MUCH. I have been very blessed, and I’d like to be more intentional this year in cultivating this practice of gratitude. Specifically, I don’t want to wait until next January to realize all the great things I’ve experienced throughout the year. Now I need to recalibrate.
My goal is to be more proactive about reflecting on precious moments and recording accomplishments as they happen. I’ve decided I will keep an accomplishments and notable moments journal for 2019. At first, I set a reminder to write in it at the end of every day. Then I thought about it and quickly changed my mind. That isn’t the kind of granularity that I need, and it’s highly unlikely that I’d keep up with it anyway. Instead, I opted to incorporate logging accomplishments as a part of my weekly review. On sundays, I typically take about 10 minutes to review my systems and habits to see overall how my task management is going. It’d be simple enough to also reflect on the things I’ve accomplished, and reasons to be thankful. In fact, that would probably even give me a boost of positivity and momentum as I plan for my next week.
Whatever system works best for you will determine how you implement this exercise. Just like with any tool, it should be optimized for your needs. The simple guiding principle of this task is that the more frequently you record, the more granular the accomplishments will be. I know that I won’t keep up with daily, but weekly is still fresh enough that I can think deeply about each day of the past week and capture anything meaningful.
So here’s to 2019. Let’s celebrate the moments as we go!