5 Reasons Why You Must Do a Year-End Review Before You Plan the Year Ahead

It’s the last day of the year. Whether 2023 was your best year ever or your most challenging year, whether you loved it and want it to continue or hated it and can’t wait to move on, it’s coming to an end.

The calendar will turn on another year.

The cultural pressure is already building to make your resolutions, set your intentions, choose your focus, and set your goals.

Take a deep breath.

Some of those things you don’t need to do at all. Resolutions? Nope. Resolve for real. And trying to set goals or intentions or choose a focus for your year ahead is a wasted effort unless you’ve first completed the pre-requisite:

A year-end review.

Here are 5 reasons why you must do a year-end review before planning your coming year.

(1) Create Context

Planning in a vacuum is a waste of time.

To plan where you’re going, you must orient yourself on a map and know where you are.

A year-end review is your opportunity to create that map and orient yourself.

As you look back at your year, you can assess what worked well and what didn’t work.

During my year-end review, I reflect back on the moments that brought me joy as well as the ones that brought frustration.

Seeing the patterns of the highs and the lows, where I found flow and where I got stuck, helps me determine how I want to orient my focus for the coming year.

(2) Reveal Patterns

A year-end-review is your opportunity to uncover the patterns that are always at play in your life, but that you can’t always see while you’re moving through it.

As Steve Jobs said,

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.

Pausing periodically to look back and review helps you connect the dots and see the patterns in what you’ve done, how you felt about it, what brought you joy or frustration, what came with ease and what came with struggle.

This insight and information can only come through personal reflecting. You can’t outsource it or get it from AI.

(3) Create Momentum

Not all years are great. Some are filled with disappointment.

We have limited control over the events that might pop up during a year that may knock us off-course. But we do have control over how we respond to those events and how we look at them through the rear-view mirror.

Regardless of what happened this past year, the year-end review is your opportunity to craft the narrative of the year in a way that serves you.

For example, even the most challenging years have big wins to celebrate. Finding and celebrating those wins helps you go into the next year from a place of strength and confidence, rather than feeling like you have to climb out of a hole.

(4) Distill Lessons Learned

Think of the year as a hotel you stayed in on vacation. If someone told you that there was gold in the hotel room, would you leave without searching for the gold?

Unlikely.

Whether its a nugget of wisdom you gleaned from a mentor or friend, or insights you’ve had about yourself from experiences, the lessons you’ve learned and earned this year are the gold.

Even more, if you don’t distill the lessons and integrate them, you’ll likely have to repeat those lessons again — which isn’t fun.

A year-end review helps you move forward by giving you a chance to look back and distill what you’ve learned so you can integrate it and take it with you.

(5) Chart Your Evolution

The most impactful question I ask myself at the end of my annual review is “who have I become?”

If you prefer it as a prompt, the prompt is “I have become a person who …”

You are not the same person now as you were on January 1 of this year. The experiences you’ve had and the lessons you’ve learned from them have impacted you.

You’ve grown. Perhaps your values and priorities have changed.

A year-end review gives you a structure in which to consider who you have become, how you have grown, and how your values and driving needs are changing.

To set goals and plan the coming year without considering your values and needs is a recipe for living out of alignment with your truth.

Create the Foundation for What You Plan to Build

If you’re stressed out about completing your year-end review before the clock strikes midnight, give yourself permission to let it be your first task of the new year.

Remember that to build something sustainable and lasting requires first building a strong foundation. Think of the year-end review as building the foundation for what you want to create and build in the year ahead.