I’m gearing up to do my annual Year in Review post at the start of January (you can check out 2020’s here) and my December monthly recap next week, so this week I wanted to share a round up of posts I’ve written to help prepare for a new year + what I’m focusing on between now and 2022 in the hopes that it gives you some inspiration!
Set Principles, Not Resolutions
This post is all about how you can create intentions and guides for yourself, rather than set resolutions. I walk you through three questions you can ask yourself to determine what you should focus on for the year.
How To Create Your 2017 Mantra
The title alone tells you that we’re going back in time! I wrote this post at a time of major change in my life and it was a great method to ground myself and have a solid mantra to use whenever the year got stressful. Again, I use a series of questions to help you create your own!
How To Set Qualitative Resolutions For 2018
This post takes you a step further from setting principles to creating more concrete actions if there are areas that you feel need more intentional change. I share my process for examining what you want to improve and helping you verbalize the action you need to take.
What I’m doing this year
This year I am dividing up my year end efforts into two categories.
Work
First, I have already spent time reviewing myself in my work. I created a doc called “Alyssa Personal Review 2021” where I recorded my thoughts and feedback for myself on my work performance. I started by brain dumping my “victories” for the year. This ranged from my promotion, to taking a data science course and was my way of getting started thinking about everything I’ve done. I keep a folder in my inbox where I save emails that are my “wins,” like congrats emails or praise from customers, so that is an easy place to go to see what has happened in the year.
Next, I reviewed all of the deals I closed and lost in the last year. As a salesperson there is a very clear measure of your performance – did you or did you not hit your quota – but I think it is so important to dig into the why so you can get better. I looked at everything I wrote about each deal, then highlighted the main takeaways.
Finally, I created my “learnings for 2022” which are all the things I want to make sure I am incorporating going into the new year. This whole process took less than two hours and provided great clarity into what I can do to become even better, plus gave me the chance to celebrate what has already been done!
Personal
In the personal realm, my process is going to be even less formalized. I brain dumped all of the life admin and clean up I want to do and plan to start this in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. For me this includes:
- Digital clean up – clearing out old contacts, bookmarks, photos (and making sure they are backed up!), backing up passwords, changing up my backgrounds
- Financial clean up – taking a look at our savings rate and investments and retirement allocations to make sure our processes are still aligned with our goals
- Physical clean up – deep cleaning the apartment and getting rid of any items around the place that we aren’t using
I also plan to do some longer journaling sessions and enjoy downtime to read and review my favorite personal development books.
How are you preparing for the new year!?
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