Capture your year!

I don't know about you, but I love this time of year. For me, it's a time for reflection and review and recalibration, and that’s why this week I wanted to share with you one of the most valuable tools from my personal tradecraft toolkit: Capturing Your Year.

Now, I hear so many people talk about their year like it ran away from them or that it felt like a “throw away” year. But even when the pace of life feels relentless, we grow and change and make progress. It’s just that we're not used to registering that growth or change or progress concretely.

And what a waste that is. What a waste to look at a day, a week, a month, a year and think “I’m glad that’s over” or "There's so much still left to do" or "Where the heck did the time go".

But instead of despairing or wondering, here's what you can do instead:

1 - Block out a 60-120 minute chunk of time in your calendar before the end of the year where you can be distraction-free and interruption free. Go somewhere quiet, peaceful, and enjoyable, and bring a journal or a pad of paper (or computer) with you.

2 - Review your calendar. Literally look at every single day from 1 January to now and look at all the meetings you had, appointments you made, people you met with, webinars you attended, events you went to, vacations you took, conferences you participated in, projects you started, etc, and start mentally reliving some of those moments. This will: a) remind you of just how-damned-much you did this year, and b) start to prompt your brain for what comes next.

3 - Capture your biggest lessons learned, mistakes made, and successes achieved. Write it all down in as much detail as possible and sit and reflect. Let the successes sink in. Let the accomplishments and holidays and all the FUN things you did sink in. And let the mistakes and the lessons you learned from making them sink in, too.

4 - Distill the above into your “Top Lessons Learned” (ideally 10-15). And think about any changes you want/need to make in your work, life, relationships, health, etc that will make it harder for you to repeat any mistakes and easier for you to move forward better, smarter, stronger.

5 - Make concrete plans. If any of those changes require other people’s input (in your business, say), or if there is anything you need to eliminate or adapt or add (a new gym membership, for example), then PLAN IT INTO YOUR CALENDAR and think about how you will integrate your lessons learned in the year to come.

6 - And finally, if you are feeling generous, share your list. You can share it with friends, family, co-workers, or just a trusted friend. But I find that by sharing our lessons, we relearn them and they get embedded that much deeper. It’s also a really nice way to make sure that others around us can learn from our experiences, good and not-so-good.

7 - Repeat each year!

I have done this exercise every year for almost a decade, and each time I do it, I am forced to to confront hard facts (instead of my unreliable memory) and am reminded of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, how much I’ve grown, and how much I’ve done. In one short year.

Our memories are painfully inadequate at remembering things accurately, and too often we think a year (month/week/day) was a “waste” when a Capture Your Year exercise proves it was anything but.

So don’t rely on your memory. Join me this December as I sit down to capture the year, crystalize key lessons and takeaways, and embed the lessons into next year. I’ll be sharing my Lessons Learned with you starting next week, so stay tuned!