Today I am reviewing my year as a preparation for planning my upcoming year and I thought
I will take you with me to show you how you can review your year, why it is important
to do so, what to look for, how to do it, then, what kind of questions you need to answer
so you can plan your most successful year yet.
So why is it important to review your previous year?
Can we just skip that and go and plan for the next year?
Well, you can, but your previous year contains so much valuable information.
When you're planning, your kind of guessing of what might work and how much time will
this take, and how much will you learn from this experience.
But if you look back at your year, you will have hard data and evidence of what is actually
working, what do you need to make sure that you plan for the next year and what you need
to avoid?
So find yourself time.
I would say minimum is 60 minutes, but I would say two to three hours or even a whole half
day is best.
Go somewhere where you're not going to be distracted.
Have something to write with, to write on.
If you have done regular reviews throughout the year, have those handy as well as your
calendar.
Firstly, analyze your previous goals.
So look at the goals you set at the beginning of this year.
See have you achieved them or not?
If you have achieved them, did you surpass your goal?
Was it easy to do?
If you've achieved all of your goals or most of them, maybe you are not ambitious enough
and you are not pushing yourself to the limit.
Maybe you just need to be a little bit more aggressive when planning for the next goals.
If you did not achieve them, why not, what happened?
Did you start well and were you progressing in the first quarter really well, but then
you stopped working on them?
Where you may be unrealistic in setting up your goals?
Or maybe you just set your goals but did not put any actions and habits behind it so it
was kind of hard to actually achieve them.
For every goal that you set write down the daily or weekly actions that you did that
contributed towards your goals and then write down what distracted you from each of the
goals.
Look at how often you were reviewing your goals.
Is this something that you set in January 1st and then you forgot about them.
Were you reviewing them every quarter, every month, every week?
I believe in setting yearly goals and setting quarterly goals and reviewing those every
week and adjusting your planning as you go.
If I don't do that, what happens is when I review my goal, I do most of my work in the
coming days or weeks and then slowly do less and less and less.
So if I review my goals only quarterly, I get most of the work done in the first two
weeks, and then for the next 2 1/2 months there is barely anything done.
So I feel that if I review my goals every week, I get this momentum going and I work
on my goals constantly.
If you have been doing regular review sessions, look at them, look for patterns.
What has been working?
What hasn't been working?
And if you have not done those review sessions, first of all, you should do them next year,
but you can look at your calendar at your appointments and meetings week by week.
It will trigger your memory as to what was happening throughout the year.
Look at your year as a whole and identify things that were really exciting stuff where
you really had fun, you relaxed a lot, stuff that was giving you a lot of learning opportunities.
Those things often are one-off things, something we don't do regularly, but something that
pushes us really further.
It's a good idea to plan for those in the upcoming year so you have more of those opportunities
in a year.
So how did I approach my yearly review?
I have done my yearly review many many times and often I have a set of questions I go through.
I actually had a video last year where I talked about it.
But this year I did it a little bit differently, I looked at my goals in the main categories
and evaluated those goals, how I achieved them or didn't achieve them, what went well,
what didn't go well, etc.
And then I looked at my life as a whole.
So, I had several main categories where I set goals.
I had my work, I had CrossFit, YouTube and my family.
When I looked at my work, I identified many great learning opportunities.
I did a three week secondment where I worked as a manager in a completely different team.
I was promoted which gave me a lot of new opportunities.
I took on a new research system that we look after and it was a great learning opportunity.
I also noticed that those projects where I had to learn something and step outside of
my comfort zone gave me the most.
So this is something I'm definitely going to keep in mind because last year, when I
was setting goals for my work, I wasn't very precise.
I've been in that position only for two months.
I didn't really have an idea of what to expect.
And all those things that came my way, were opportunities to which I said yes, but I would
like to now be a little bit more proactive in the coming year and seek out those opportunities
so when it comes to my exact goals for my work, I focus mainly on things that were inside
of my control.
I wanted to use time-blocking, which I was quite successful with, although I noticed
when I was using Cal Newport’s Planner, I was much more consistent than when I was
just using a blank notebook.
Something to think about for next year.
I also wanted to use Cal Newport’s task system which I used quite extensively, although
I fell off a little bit towards the end of the year.
My third goal for my work was to get my contract prolonged to which was successful.
For CrossFit, I had a successful competition season which was very encouraging.
I also switched my programming and I saw great results from that.
And I also attended a training bootcamp with one of the best Australian CrossFiters and
that was a great learning opportunity, and I definitely got a lot out of that so I'm
going to see if there is something similar next year so I can plan for that.
For specific goals I wanted to train six times a week, which I did most of the year.
Again, I fell off a little bit towards the end of the year.
I had some numbers as to where my strength, gymnastics and endurance should be.
Some of them, I hit, some of them were probably a little bit more ambitious.
I think if I would have set those goals in only, you know, one aspect, I would achieve
it.
But because there were so many different things which the sport of CrossFit has a lot of things,
it was probably a little bit too ambitious and unrealistic.
For YouTube.
I had my ups and downs.
I became monetized which was really great.
I saw a great growth for a few weeks and then it kind of went down into a bit of a plateau
and a slow growth, but I'm hoping I am back to growing again.
The reason why I didn't see constant growth was because I actually pulled back a little
bit and stopped posting for a few months because of my work and the stress that was thereand
I just could not handle everything.
So for my specific goals, I wanted to get monetized - I did.
Then I had some goals around how often I want to post my videos, which was something that
was completely in my control, but I actually failed.
I wanted to post once a week or maybe even twice week.
I managed it for a few months, but most of the year I was not successful.
The last category where I had goals is family.
As it became almost a rule, the most exciting memories and stuff that I enjoyed were whole
day trips or multiple day trips.
Of course, with a small child that is more challenging and also the pandemic is preventing
me from planning something in advance, which is something that I tried to do in the past
years to ensure that we really have these experience, but we still did some which was
really, really great.
I also achieved quite a lot when it comes to my daughter and what I wanted to do with
her, so I'm very happy in that area.
In some other areas when it comes to, for example, communicating with my parents and
my sisters and spending some more time with them, that wasn't going that well.
We also had to deal with close family member who became very seriously ill, which impacted
our whole life as a family, our own well-being, and it impacted every single aspect of our
life.
So, we had to learn how to deal with that and live with this.
One thing that I have learned from reviewing my year is that I tend to set ambitious goals
in most of my categories, as if I have only that one category, I need to take into account
that I am pursuing multiple things, so I need to take into account how much time and energy
I will actually have for each category.
I also sometimes try to get most out of everything and don't take into consideration that there
are outside influences that can impact how much time and energy I have for my goals.
Now that I have reviewed my year, I am going to sit down and plan my upcoming year, my
goals and what I want to achieve as well as how I'm going to do that - my daily and weekly
actions.
I'm going to film a video, so if you would like to see how I do that, make sure that
you are subscribed and you turn on the notification so that you don't miss out that video.
Thank you for watching.
I'll see you next time, bye.