Techniques for the year in review and setting up for 2025

Hey folks, happy new year, how is everyone? 

We had a great period of unplugging around the holidays with a road trip to a frozen lake with some snow and a lot of rain. Either way it is 2025 now and I wanted to share a simplified way that I’ve been looking at 2024 and setting up for 2025.
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After going through several years of more detailed and time consuming methods of summing up the last year, I’ve settled on this more pragmatic and faster method that can fit on one page of handwritten or typed text. It surfaces the big things that happened, and the things that you want to change for the coming year. 

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+Locations - Where were you this year, countries, states, counties? This helps me remember what happened and to think about which places I want to live and work in the next year. 

+Good - This section holds the wins, accomplishments and good luck items. This is part gratitude exercise and part identification of things that are on track and went well. NPR’s life kit had a good exercise of adding things that you remember feeling, tasting and experiencing in the last year. 

+Hard  - These are the potentially bad, negative and difficult things that happened in the last year. This is called hard because they are not necessarily all bad if there are ways to flip them to positive post traumatic growth and learning. 

+Fails - Things that didn’t happen this year that you had wanted to take place. Can you change your systems to make them happen next year or do you need to change the direction and goals?

+More - What do you want to scale up in the coming year? What would make life and work better in the coming 12 months?

+Less - What do you want to reduce, delete or delegate in life and work in the next year? How can we reduce tasks, responsibilities and events to focus more on things that matter in life and work?

+Techniques - What techniques do you intend to use to put the ideas above into action? Calendar blocks are one thing I’m refreshing and updating for 2025. These are consecutive day blocks such as the one week spring break trip with the family. They are also useful in blocks during the day, for example there is one new weekday recurring block on my calendar each morning to work on the Social Sector Titan blog and create posts like this

Wishing you all a wonderful year with joyful pursuit of whatever lights you up. 

Happy Trails.