Every year, we start with lots of optimism. We have the opportunity to start a brand new year. We want our year to be filled with joy and adventure. We want to accomplish big in life. Who doesn’t?
But as the years pass by, we go with the flow and forget to spend our year intentionally.
A meaningful life will always be intentional. Meaning in life needs to be constructed. Meaning requires intentionality. Friendships will be intentional. Adventures will be intentional. Jobs will be intentional. Even the words we utter will be intentional.
It takes a lot of training and small steps to make ‘The Year’ intentional. One powerful exercise that my friend and I discovered to make our year intentional was to do a Yearly Check-In right at the start of every new year, typically on the 1st of January, where we celebrate the passing year and set goals for the new year.
This ritual has been so rewarding that what keeps my friend and I motivated during the year, surprisingly, isn’t our goals, relationships, money, or status, but instead, it is looking forward to the Yearly Check-In where we can proudly share with each other “I was able to do x thing.”
During this meeting, we sit down and take turns listing out all of our successes of the passing year in a notepad. We also look at what goals we accomplished, what goals we did not accomplish, and why.
This idea came from a simple realization. We realized that we didn’t celebrate enough! In all the times we’ve been together as friends, we let the stress of life suck the joy out of it and forgot that even little accomplishments were worth celebrating. We thought we could make our days brighter just by celebrating each of our successes and starting a year with a lot of pride and excitement.
Hence the birth of The Yearly Check-In!
This is the best guide on how to quickly start this habit and reap the maximum benefit of it.
How to Do a Yearly Check-In Properly in 5 Steps
In a word, the Yearly Check-In is a celebration. Celebration of our successes of the passing year.
My friend and I have the simplest and most effective formula to do a Yearly Check-In. After all, we want this to be an enjoyable experience where we celebrate our previous year’s successes and are excited for the awesome things to come next year.
Prerequisites
- A friend – it is best to do the check-in with a friend. Sharing joy multiplies it. If you can’t convince a friend to do the Yearly Check-In with you, doing it yourself is totally fine.
- Notebook or anything equivalent – we personally use Notion (Notion didn’t pay me to say this 😉)
Step 1: List Down All The Successes You Had During The Preceding Year
In turn, write all your successes for the previous year in bullet points. When I say all, I mean ALL. No exceptions. Don’t shy away from your achievements.
Write down the smallest one to the largest one. Each success counts. You can edit later if anything is unnecessary.
Some examples of success from my first Yearly Check-In,
- Payed off mom’s debts ($3400)
- Found biking as a hobby
- Got provincial healthcare
While you are making your list, ask your friend to do the same. In about 15 to 20 minutes or so, you both should be able to come up with a solid list. In Notion, we do it simultaneously without breaking a sweat.
Step 2: Match the Number of Items with Your Friend‘s List
When you make your initial list, you might think you’ve thought through all your successes.
But most likely, you might have forgotten something small. Such as making your first savings account that year or starting a nighttime face care routine.
If your friend listed 25 achievements and you were only able to find 20, try to match him/her. If you think hard, most likely, you will dig out some more.
This mining out of past successes is a major joy and win of doing this exercise. You will be able to see in words how much you accomplished the past year and how awesome the year was!!!
Writing down amplifies the joy of achieving something. During the year, what was your own little struggle to get something done, for example, getting your first driver’s license, is now a cause of celebration. There’s no better way to celebrate the new year and say goodbye to the past year.
By noting it down with a good friend, you’re appreciating the fruit of your efforts and putting all of your achievements in a permanent Hall of Fame for you to peruse in years to come.
Step 3: Pick and Highlight The Top 3 Successes
Once you both have completed making a list, go through each success individually and talk about it. How did it feel when you were working for it? What does each achievement mean to you, and what will it mean to you in the future?
Then, take a slight pause and select the top three successes from the list. The top three achievements you think were the most impressive, impactful and meaningful of the preceding year.
We highlighted our top three so that later on when we review this list, it will be easier to identify our most meaningful accomplishments.
Step 4: “Look Ahead” List: Write Down What You Want To Accomplish For The Next Year
A Yearly Check-In is incomplete if it does not prepare you for the new year!
After having gone through our list of successes, we were in awe of all the things we were able to accomplish during the year!
We underestimated how the year really went.
What we would typically describe as an “Okayish year” was more significant than we thought. This is because, subconsciously, we tend to play down our achievements. Our brain is incapable of creating averages or summaries of things that happened in the past. So we are not exactly in a position to have an overview look of what went by unless we do so intentionally with the help of an exercise like the Yearly Check-In.
Looking at our list of achievements, we felt motivated. So the next step in the Yearly Check-In is to write down all the things you want to accomplish in the brand new year.
It’s literally a wish list, albeit a more realistic one!
This list has to be realistic because you wanna be sure that the items on your “Look Ahead” list are also in your next year’s “Look Back” list — the list of achievements.
Step 5: Pick and Highlight One Item You Absolutely Can’t Wait For
From the Look Ahead list, highlight one goal that you absolutely can’t wait to see materialize.
This is the goal that’s going to be in your mind for the year to come. Hopefully, the new year will finish with this incredible goal achieved.
My Complete Yearly Check-In of The Year 2021
For you to fully comprehend what a Yearly Check-In looks like, I am sharing my complete unchanged check-in for the Year 2021.
Look Behind — Successes of The Year 2021
Jassim
- Bachelor’s degree (Feb – McGill University)
- Became a pro dev (Aug – ZB)
- Mending pandemic wounds (Aug)
- Communicate and work entirely in French
- Made first TFSA (dec)
- Mastered the art of finding a job (created a methodical approach)
- Reduced rent from $1250 to $600
- Paid off mom’s debts ($3400)
- Became financially independent (lots of relief for parents)
- Found biking as a hobby
- Survived Covid + double vaccinated.
- Started savings (ending the year with $5k+ in account)
- Learned new tech (Camunda, …)
- Multiple monitors
- Bought the latest iPhone (13)
- Bought iPad.
- Got my first mechanical keyboard (Keychron K2)
- Did first remote party.
- First exposure to enterprise code creation.
- Learnt open source code exploration (Code like Newspaper)
- Learnt how to build, develop and maintain services
- Got provincial healthcare
- Mitigated acne
- Found a career (where not miserable)
- Got through COMP-251
- Found clarity that the academic route in humanities is not for me.
Look Ahead — Goals for The Year 2022
Jassim
- Become a blogger
- More empathy – Some proxies: Better relationships, more resonant ideas (Blog response a proxy).
- Ship Pmp-Lightning MVP
- CrossFit habit
- 5k run
- Make more friends
- Solid fashion sense
- Solve the food problem
- Take a vacation!
- Pay McGill loan
- Regain spiritual balance
Reviewing The Yearly Check-Ins
The Yearly Check-In is a great celebration.
- It celebrates the preceding year.
- It brings excitement for the coming year.
- It puts all your successes in stone forever.
This third aspect of the Yearly Check-In is an added bonus to what is already a great activity.
Next year, when you look back on this year, you wanna check out how many of the goals you set for the passing year were you able to really accomplish.
Often, this brings our missed-match priorities to the fore. What you might have been excited about at the beginning of the year is not what the year was gonna be about. And to figure out what the year really turned out to be is a real delight, something you can only know when you do the Yearly Check-In.
