Beyond The Smalltalk: Annual Reflection & Planning Exercise

Making sure the next year is a smashing success

I don’t know about you, but when December comes around, I get very introspective. It’s a mix of my birthday (Dec11th), the mellow Christmas season, and the year end sentimentality. Inevitably, it’s also the best time to reflect on the past year and to set goals for the next year. Not resolutions, not intentions, but goals. Hard-hitting goals, objectives, targets.

I take an issue with the idea of soft intention-setting, because it’s too easy to break those or move the goalpost down on those. That’s why I’m intent on making them specific targets, ideally accompanied by a number.

In the following I want to walk you through the exercise I do, and encourage you to do something similar. There is no single right reflection exercise for you, in fact, there are hundreds out there. You have to see which one most resonates with you (usually a factor of “do I have the time to do it” and “does it capture me on the right dimensions”). I just want to share with you the one that I do, and with that lay a foundation for you to create your own – maybe the exact same, maybe a modification of that. Here is my process in 3 steps

1. Defining the Dimensions

My annual reflection and planning exercise takes places across 6 specific dimensions that are the most relevant to me. For me, that’s: