A year-end review that doesn’t feel like a tax audit. For anyone who meant to reflect but got swallowed by the holidays. It's a soft reset, a sharp look back, and a gentle nudge forward.
Let me guess. You meant to do a proper year-end review. Maybe even had a few tabs open for weeks—a half-written journal entry, some color-coded plans, a quote from Seneca, perhaps.
And now it’s January. For some of us, the only reflection so far has been noticing how quickly the first week disappeared.
Over the years, I’ve built and rebuilt all kinds of systems for reviewing the year. At one point, I created a questionnaire with 126 questions. I cleared my calendar, brewed good coffee, and sat down like it was a quarterly board meeting for a startup going through an existential crisis.
Still, I’d end up overwhelmed by the sprawl of it all—the travel patterns, the intimacy hiccups, the spreadsheet rabbit holes. What started as reflection quietly turned into a full-scale audit.
So this year, I tried something else.
I didn’t aim for comprehensiveness. I aimed for contact. Just sitting with the year as it was, without forcing it into categories, lessons, or tidy conclusions.
This is what remained once I trimmed the process down to its spine. Fifty-two questions. Just the ones that kept earning their place.
Identity & Life Direction (8)
Looking back
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