Career Tips

Why do I do an annual review?

If you read my now page you will know that I received a promotion at the end of 2023 to Assistant Director. That promotion has supported the continuation of my normal annual review process as a sign of success of the work I have been doing.

Several years ago, I decided to keep track of my progress and steps toward my ideal life. I started doing this by dividing my life into specific areas, including the following:

• Career and Work
• Environment
• Health
• Finances
• Learning
• Relationships
  

At this time in my life, these are the areas that I want to focus on. For each area, I set a vision statement defining the characteristics of that area in my ideal life. These vision statements help me to determine what objectives to set for myself throughout the year.

At the end of every year, I do a review process to reflect. An important part of this reflection is determining my progress in each area of life.

What my annual review looks like

At this point in time, I just use a note page in Anytype for my Annual Review. At a future point in time, I think it would make sense for me to set up a custom object type for this. My annual review note is made up of six toggle sections so that I can easily collapse everything to focus only on one section at a time.

I have adapted the template for my annual review originally created by Steven Schlafman. The six sections are:

Moments and Milestones

This section has the year split up into quarters so that you can indicate the moments or milestones that you want to remember within each quarter. For 2023 I also added a section for “Milestones that I can’t remember the dates for”.

Reflection and Lessons

I love this section because it has a lot of guiding questions that make it really easy. This section includes questions that help you determine what worked well in the year and what didn’t work so well. The questions do require some thought and honesty with yourself, but if you can achieve those two things, this section is very helpful.

Life Assessment

This one is mostly a table with around a dozen different life dimensions, including Health, Friends, Family, Money, Romance, etc. The table provides a prompt and rating section. The rating system I used for each dimension was a 1-10 scale.

Identify your Intentions

This section is all about determining how you will approach the new year. There are some aspirational questions that go well with my ideal life visions. There are also some questions about some of your fears or obstacles and how you plan to address them.

Goals and Action Plan

Now that we have defined our intentions, it is time to set some outcome-based goals that will help us move those intentions forward. This section uses an iterative approach to help you narrow down your most important goals and then determine how to succeed, how you might fail, your confidence level of completion, and your initial action steps.

Write to your Future Self

I treat this section as a little more free-form. For my 2023 review, I only wrote one paragraph, but it is a paragraph that reminds me where I was in 2023 and will be a benchmark for how far I go in 2024 and future years.

I have now used this same template for two years, and it has been very helpful in reflecting on how far I have come. I also treat them as a resource to look back on to determine what might have worked for me at a specific time that I might be slipping with now. For example, I feel like in 2023, we lost control of our personal finances a bit, so I was able to look back at my 2022 review when our finances were a highlight of the year. Then, I was able to determine some strategies to use for 2024 to get back on track.

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TLDR

For my annual review, I have found it beneficial to use a consistent template to track my progress over the years. This template serves as a benchmark for my growth and helps me reflect on how far I have come. It also serves as a resource to identify areas where I may be slipping and allows me to implement strategies to stay on track. For instance, when our personal finances became a challenge in 2023, I referred back to my 2022 review to regain control. If you found this article helpful, please clap, share, and follow for more insights.