The Minimum Viable End-of-Year Review and Planning

I read 10 ways of reviewing and planning and came up with this template

Happy New Year everyone!

With the new year comes a new year-themed email. I will be writing about how to do the most effective end-of-year review and new-year planning. Most people make new year's resolutions, but people often joke about breaking their New Year's resolution after one week. Let's fix that.

One of my experiments with Dalle2

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I've been doing end-of-year reviews and new-year planning for the last five or so years which has been helpful in achieving my goals. However, it's become real clunky. I've added things over the years as I learn about other people's end-of-year routines. To be exact, my review and planning ended up with 67 prompts!

So last month, I asked myself "What is the least I can do to get the benefits of an end-of-year review and planning?" You know, a kind of minimum viable end-of-year review and planning (MVERP). I was planning on sending this email before the end of the year, but I ended up reading 10 different ways to reflect and plan and testing them on myself so alas I was late.

So, how are we going to set ourselves up for success in the future? The steps are:

1. Identify learnings from the past year

2. Define your values

3. Ideate and prioritize goals

4. Plan actions for 2023

5. Define systems

6. Make commitments

Looks like a lot of steps, but they're the most important ones to ensure success.

You can do this in any medium you like. These days, I use Notion, but I've also used pen and paper in the past.

Identify learnings from the past year

Why this is required: Without learning from the past, we will end up making the same mistakes.

I like how the relationship between experience and learnings is described in the book 15 Laws of Growth

"There’s an old joke that experience is a hard teacher because the test is given first and the lesson is given afterward. That’s true, but only if the person takes time to reflect after the experience. Otherwise, you receive the test first and the lesson may never come."

Said in other words, experience doesn't automatically lead to learning, you need to draw the learnings from the experience to learn, and you do that by reflecting on the experience.

In fact, a study where participants solve puzzles done by Giada Di Stefano found that participants that chose to reflect instead of practice more answered correctly 23% more. So, if we're optimistic, you can act correctly 23% more in 2023 if you reflect over your 2022 now.

How might we identify learnings most effectively? This part will take the most time because we're bad at remembering things. You will have to jog your memory.

1. Go through anything that can help you remember, for example, your calendar, work calendar, photos, and notes.

2. Write down anything that stands out to you. This could be something that was a big deal to you, triggered a lot of emotion (good or bad), something you want to remember, etc. Write down anything you like, we will add more structure later.

3. Additionally, write down if you had any goals you planned to achieve in 2022. Perhaps you have that from your previous New Year planning. You will likely get some great learnings from them.

4. Look through your list and note down any learnings or important decisions connected to the items. It may be clear why you should note down learnings here (that's the desired outcome of this section). But why important decisions? With each decision, there is a learning.

5. For each decision, ask:

   1. What did I think would happen?

   2. What actually happened?

   3. What can I learn from the difference? (Or you were correct, and that's a learning too)

6. Highlight the best learnings you'd like to remember going forward.

7. (Bonus) Group the most important learnings into themes so they are even easier to refer back to. (I know I said Minimum Viable, what's a Minimum Viable thing without some scope creep?)

There you go, now you have your list of most important learnings, organized neatly so they are easy to refer back to in the future! Refer back to these learnings as you go through the rest of the MVERP as you'll probably be able to apply them immediately.

Define your values

Why this is required: Without knowing your values, you might not create fulfilling goals.

You might be thinking "Values? Why are we not talking about goals?". This reflection does include goals, but it's important that they are coming from an internal source instead of an external one. I.e. something you want as opposed to something society or your friends and family want for you.

Defining your values also helps balance out tactics you might use to achieve a goal. For example, if I value being highly skilled, that might lead to a goal of becoming a lead designer as a way to improve my skills. Then it's clear that I shouldn't accept an offer from a company as their first designer, but with the title "lead designer". That company would not know if I am highly skilled or not (because they have no designer to evaluate me), and it would be possible for me to get that job without actually improving my skills in 2023.

However, if I had just defined the goal "Become a lead designer" without defining why I want that, then it would be pretty tempting to take the job offer and feel satisfied over achieving my big shiny goal in record time.

After trying many prompts to identify my values, I found these two questions to be the most efficient:

• If you had the full approval of everyone (so you weren't trying to please or impress anyone), what would you want to do with your life and what type of person would you want to be?

• At your funeral, what would you love the people you care about to say about you? About the role you played in their lives?

So, based on the above:

• What do you value? What is part of your ideal life?

The answers you get should let you see where you want to be and the difference is between where you are now. You have your valued direction!

Ideate and prioritize goals

Why this is required: Increase the chance of finding great goals by having several options. Then deciding which to focus on so you’re not spread thin 

Now that you know what you value, you can discover goals that let you live your values. Ask yourself this question to start ideating:

• What major goals can I set for the next few years that are aligned with my values?

Now you have a list of lots of fun goals for the next few years, unfortunately, you won't have time for all of it. There have been many years where I have fallen into the trap of setting too many goals and then failing several because I didn't spend enough time on them - some of which I could have achieved if I hadn't spread myself too thin. It's natural to want to make many big positive changes in our lives, but that sets you up for failure because you don't have infinite time and energy. Instead of doing a little on a lot and not reaching your target, do a lot on a little so that you do reach your targets.

How many goals you can take on will depend on your context. Some will have more time, some will have less to spend on their New Year Goals. See if you can think of how many goals you have been able to achieve in previous years. For reference, I focused on 3 big goals and 1 smaller goal. And remember, the purpose of this is to decide your 2023 goal. You will likely be able to work on your other multiyear goals in later years.

To help yourself choose which to prioritize, ask:

• "Which goals, if achieved, will improve my life the most?"

Now that you have chosen which multiyear goals to focus on, let's break it down into your 2023 goals.

• "What do I have to accomplish by the end of 2023 to accomplish this goal in the next few years?"

And there you go, now you have your 2023 goals.

Plan actions for 2023

Why this is required: To achieve your goal, you need to break it down into smaller parts so they are actionable

Now comes one of the fun parts! We will find the main leveraged actions for each of your goals. Why does it matter? Well, what if, instead of doing all possible tasks and getting overwhelmed, you decided to focus on a few tasks that have a high impact? This is the Pareto principle in action. Let's use that for your goals.

1. For each of your 2023 goals ask "What is the one thing I need to do, if nothing else, to achieve my goal?"

   1. After writing that one thing, ask "When do I think I will have accomplished it?" Add that next to your task as a deadline.

2. Then ask, "What is the very next thing I need to do to move towards the one thing?" and add a deadline to that.

3. Now ask "What is the one thing I can do in between to ensure I achieve my goal?" and add a deadline.

4. Then ask "What is the one thing I can do in between the first one thing and my goal to ensure I achieve my goal?" and add the date here as well.

Now you'll see that you have four impactful actions with deadlines that all lead up to you achieving your goal. This allows you to achieve your goal with as few steps as possible. But what's fun is that you can keep going if you want, asking yourself "What is the one thing I can do in between to ensure I achieve my goal?" to get more leveraged actions.

Define systems

Why this is required: I'll let the quote below from Atomic Habits explain:

"If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."

So this is an important step to ensure you do the work even when you're tired, you don't have the motivation. Ask:

• What habits, things, people, etc. do I need to work towards my goal even when I don't feel like it?

Make commitments

Now let's make sure you do the things by making commitments. By scheduling the time in your calendar, making plans with others, or paying in advance, you give yourself that extra push to move towards your goal.

1. Look at your actions and your systems and see what commitments you can make

2. Make them!

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And that's it! Now you're done! Phew. Now, this plan will likely change as your priorities change, unforeseen events come up, or you learn that what you think you wanted you don't really want. That's all ok, we can't plan for that. The point of this plan is for you to get started in the right direction.

Hope you enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments if you tried it or if you have any questions. I've only used this on myself, so my explanation may not be as clear as I think it is.