How to do an end of year review that helps you make progress

The process of self-evaluation can be a confronting but also a cathartic experience; it can help you to feel more positive when you reflect on what you have achieved or overcome.

What will make next year better than this one? Achieving more goals? Making more money? Feeling healthier? Running further? Taking a holiday? An end of year review is a good place to start looking at how to achieve these aims. As we start being able to countdown to the new year in numbers of weeks, it is a good time to start thinking ahead and taking a moment to reflect on how the past 12 months have gone.

What many planners and journals include are pages for reflection and review. These are useful tools but you can easily do one at the back of your diary or any notebook. You could even write it as a separate document or letter that you store and keep so that you have a record of your annual progress and reflections. There are digital templates and you could always type up a review to store on hard drive but we know handwriting is better for retaining information, and it also helps you stay in a better mood than typing.

You can choose how to do you review. You might want to focus solely on your performance in your job or as a business owner. It will involve metrics and milestones. You might also choose to include more personal reflections about family and health to provide a broad overview of the year as a whole. This can be helpful as a way to observe correlations and patterns in performance with what was happening outside of work and your mindset at the time.

Below we look at why an end of year review can be so valuable, and the six main steps that will help you curate a comprehensive, reflective, and useful review.