This review process came after years of pulling together different processes to create what felt right for me. Enjoy! Inspiration for you to check out: Anthony Gustin Steve Schlafman Reboot YearCompass.

<aside> 🔙 This serves explicitly to play back the past year, as I find the past provides many lessons for the upcoming year - as well as allow us to remove any baggage that would otherwise follow us. This should be done prior to - and potentially in concert with - planning for the year ahead. Let’s go!

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Step 1: Mindset

• It’s important to get into the right mindset where you can be reflective. Put on some nice calm music.
• Find an environment and time where interruptions will be limited.
• You’ll want 2-3 hours to run through this full.
• If you find focusing hard, consider booking a Flow Club session (yes they have 120/180 minute sessions you can join!)
• You’ll want a notebook, Notion page, or blank Google Doc to take your notes in.

Step 2: The Calendar Review

Your calendar is a historical record of where you where, what you did, and who you interacted with. That’s gold!

• Take out your calendar - ideally on a desktop or tablet - you want to be able to see a week at a time.

• Create four columns in your notes:

  Highlights/Lowlights	Energy +	Energy -	People I enjoyed

• Jump back to the first week of the year, and ask yourself four questions:

  • Highlights/Lowlights: What major things (if any) happened that week? Trips, conferences, business inflections, etc. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad.
  • Energy +: What did I do that, as I recall now, brought me a lot of energy and made me feel great? Attending the MMT conference, hot yoga, kicking off a new cohort.
  • Energy -: What did I do that, as I recall now, was an energy vampire and made me feel worse? Weekly ops meeting, two hour “brainstorming session,” useless networking lunch
  • People: Who are the people that I met that week that I really enjoyed meeting with, and would enjoy seeing again (regardless of “value”)

• Rinse and repeat for the remaining weeks of the year, right up through last week.

• Just by what you’ve written, your brain is already in overdrive and finding patterns as it connects the dots. Wait, there’s more!

<aside> 📸 Bonus round! Review your camera roll on your phone to see what else you missed!

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