Doing a Year-End Review – How to be successful with New Year’s Resolutions

January 1, 2012 1 Comment

Happy New Year!

This is the time of year we all do self reflection and resolve to improve ourselves in the new year.  As most everyone knows making resolutions like “I’m going to lose weight” rarely are successful.  The main reason for this is these goals are not put in a context that will allow for long-term success.  Once the initial weight loss wear off and we are stuck in the daily grind of our lives we revert to our old habits.

If you really want to resolve to accomplish something and truly make a commitment with yourself, then you need to create a environment for long-term success.  This means adopting GTD and incorporating your desired outcome into your trusted system.

I recommend you do a “Year-End Review” to reflect on last year and project into next year.  Then if something comes out of that self reflection that you really are willing to commit to, then you need to incorporate it into your system and work your system every week via the weekly review.  By using this approach (as opposed to a new year’s resolution) you will have a much better chance of long-term success.

The year-end review is similar to a weekly review but at a much higher level.  Here are the questions I ask myself:

Looking back on 2011:

  • What were your wins for the year?
  • What were the risks you took?
  • What is your unfinished business from this year that will carry forward to 2012?
  • What are you most happy about completing?
  • Who were the people that had the greatest impact on your life this year?
  • What was your biggest surprise?
  • What did you give back to your community?

Looking forward to 2012:

  • What would you like to be your biggest win to be this year?
  • What are you planning to do to improve yourself?
  • What would you be most happy about completing in the coming year?
  • What would you most like to change about yourself?
  • What are you looking forward to learning?
  • What do you think your biggest risk will be?
  • What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving?

Filed under Best Practices, Yearly Review

About Michael Keithley
CIO at UTA

One Response to Doing a Year-End Review – How to be successful with New Year’s Resolutions

  1. Dan says:
    January 2, 2012 at 10:22 pm

    For implementing GTD you can use this this application:

    http://www.Gtdagenda.com

    You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, and a calendar.
    Syncs with Evernote and Google Calendar, and also comes with mobile version, and Android and iPhone apps.

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