Looking Back on 2019 for a Great 2020
Today we’re going to be walking through the process of how to conduct an end of year review by letting you in while I went through my own review.
The first thing you are going to need to do is grab a copy of this PDF:
Next week I'm going to get into planning out our 2020, but to really get a picture of where we want to go it's a good idea to figure out where you are and where you've been. A big problem with ADHD is that we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. We'd like to think we'd learn from our experience, but unless we actively look back at what that experience was it is hard to learn anything from it.
Since I've started doing yearly reviews, I've realized that I'm pretty bad at looking back. Often I feel like I'm just spinning my wheels, but it turns out that it's just that my rearview mirror is broken. The problem is that when I look back I tend to only remember a small fraction of what went on over the year. I mean even when I've tried doing a weekly review I find that I can't actually accurately remember what went on that week. But that doesn't mean that we can't do something to help jog our memories.
To start off our review we're going to take a look at what our goals were for 2019 - and if you didn't set goals for 2019 that's okay. We all start off in this process somewhere, so feel free to skip this step if you want to. For 2018 I had a nice orderly document where I wrote this all down, but unfortunately I was a little disorganized coming into 2019 and as I've gone through this process I've realized that my 2019 planning documents were in several places... and I'm actually pretty sure I lost a couple of them. That's okay, and guess what, it's also a great thing for me to note in my review because it let's me know that I want to have a more systematized approach for how I'm storing these things for my 2020 review. How's that for looking ahead? Remember this whole thing is a process and we're always learning.
Some of my goals for 2019 were:
Create a routine to put down my phone by 7pm
Get certified as a coach
Finish Online classes that I have signed up for
Organize my garage
You may notice that starting this podcast wasn't one of my goals for 2019 and that's because this particular podcast wasn't on my radar yet, but I did come across this note in one of my planning documents: "thinking about a podcast on a few topics like goal setting and planning" - and this was well before I had the actual idea for and ADHD podcast, at the time I was just spit-balling ideas so it didn't actually make it into a goal list.
Now onto how I did with those goals - I accomplished one of those goals, and it was creating a routine where I put down my phone at 7 pm. And while I don't have my phone down at that time every night, it is part of my routine and so most nights I'm off my phone by 7, so that's a win. I think it was a pretty good goal to have completed because it also had the cascading effect of reducing my stress, making it easier for me to get into bed earlier in the evening and making it easier for me to connect with my family. While at the beginning of the year I probably wouldn't have listed that as my most important goal, I think it actually might have been.
I also had the goal of getting certified as a coach, which is really about looking at career opportunities and I think really that starting this podcast was in that same vein. While the specific actions of the goal weren't completed I think the spirit of the goal was completed - so I think really that had I been more specific about why I want to become certified as a coach I wouldn't have written that goal down that way.
Now for the goals I didn't complete - finishing the online classes I'd signed up for. I'm not listing them out because there are just too many. I'm a sucker for signing up for online classes. And while I complete some of them, I usually don't finish most of them. My big problem with online classes is that they don't have deadlines and they don't have accountability. They call easily in the important but not urgent category and can easily fall into the not important and not urgent category and then I never do them. But I still feel guilty about it. So what can I learn from this? Well I get to my 2020 planning I can put on my "not to-do" is that I'm not signing up for any online classes.
I also failed to get my garage organized. This might not seem like a big one, but it's actually another one of those goals that would have cascading effects. When I moved in 2018 to my new house we put a lot of crap in the garage. I have a vision of how I can use that space for my fitness and hobbies but as it stands now I usually can only do one or the other and I have to keep moving stuff around. My big problem with how I wrote down this goal was that I was too vague with what I wanted to get done and I didn't focus on the why of what I wanted to get done. For 2020 I'm going to keep this goal, but I'm going to be breaking it down into smaller pieces and really focus on why it's important to me.
You may be saying to yourself, hey none of those goals you listed out were smart goals, what gives? And you know you are right, I would have been better off this year had I really worked through what my goals were for the year. The end of 2018 was a hard time for me, just a few months before my mom had unexpectedly passed away. I was a bit of a mess and while I did try and keep up with some of my planning stuff, it didn't really happen in an organized way. Sometimes that's going to happen. Life is going to be hard sometimes and it's all the harder when you've got ADHD. While that made 2019 a hard year for me, I'm not going to let that keep me from planning my 2020.
We've gotten through our goals, now let's take a look at the rest of our year. We're going to start by looking throughout calendars week by week and pulling out everything that we did throughout the year. I'll be honest, I thought I had a pretty good recollection of this year and that this part of the exercise wouldn't be that important for me. Well, I was wrong. As I went through the weeks I kept finding things that I wouldn't have written down as accomplishments but were things that were actually important. One of the goals I didn't list above was working on finishing up everything for my mom's estate, so there were things like selling her house that I had to do, but I just kind of forgot about it.
There was also the community yard sale that happened - it was great, I got rid of so much crap and I'm looking forward to the one next year, but it was a complete blank in my mind.
So don't skip this step, you are going to be surprised by what you find. There were a ton of things that I wouldn't have written down if I didn't go through my calendar and that list is important for our next step, which is sorting them.
One of the fun things we do in the ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability groups for planning is looking at things through our various Life Domains, and what we're doing here is separating all these events into big buckets. When we're planning we can decide which bucket we want to focus our efforts into, but for this part of the exercise, we're just moving our accomplishments over the year into all the buckets to see where we focused most of our efforts. There are a lot of ways that you can separate your life domains, but we're going to keep simple for now and break it down into five overall categories.
Our categories are:
Home/Family
Work/Career
Health
Personal Growth/ADHD Management
Fun
If you need to add categories do so, but I've always found that simpler is better. I started with only 3 categories here, but I decided I wanted to make sure that we were making sure that we were separating things like fun because I know that’s a life domain I forget about sometimes. A big part of this exercise is making sure that you aren't neglecting any of these domains of life. It's easy to let yourself become single-minded and only focus on one area of life. And let me also be clear, we aren't looking to "balance" these domains of life. Balance isn't something we're ever really going to obtain and it's too elusive to make a goal. For instance, if I was trying to balance work against fun, how many games of pickleball would equal recording a podcast.
These buckets are going to overlap. I have fun things that I do with my family and fun things that I do at work. It's okay for them to overlap - you can choose to which category you want to put those things in or you can just put them in both. We want these buckets to give us a rough estimation of how we're spending our time. Once we have this information we can ask ourselves if we are spending our time how we really want to be. I know looking at my domains that I haven't been spending nearly enough time on fun - it's really easy to get focused on other areas of my life, but that domain is just as important as the others.
One more thing I want to talk about domains before we move on is the idea of looking at them over these longer periods. Time blindness makes it easy for us to think that what's going on now is how things have always been and always will be - but things are always changing. Over the last few months, I've been focused on getting this podcast off the ground so my work domain bucket has been overflowing but when I look at my domains over the entire year I can see that I wasn't always spending so much time on work. I'd like to get back to a more... okay, I said I didn't want to use the word balanced earlier and balance isn't the focus here, what I'd like is just to make sure that I'm not neglecting some of my other buckets so much. For 2020 I'd like to make sure that I'm giving enough of my attention to the health and fun domains.
Reflection
It's important to ask yourself questions to end the year, but it is also important that you don't go overboard here. You may have heard of the 80/20 principle before and I do have plans to do some specific episodes on it, but the basic premise is basically that 80% of your results are going to come from 20% of your work.
We're going to use that principle for this exercise. On the worksheet for this episode, I've got a whole list of questions that you can use for this reflection part, but I want you to just answer the 3-5 questions that are the most important to you. Not all these questions are going to be that relevant to you, and that's okay. For example, I've got down what are the most important books you've read this year as a question - guess what, if you haven't read any books or even if you've read some and they just didn't do much for you, that is going to be a pretty crappy question for you. I've got years of perfectionist in me that says if a question is on the paper I've got to answer it, but, okay, deep breath here, we don't have to answer all the questions.
You may be asking, well why not answer all the questions anyway? 3-5 questions might be good, but wouldn't all of them be better? And sure, feel free to answer more if you want to. But remember this is only the first part of our 2020 planning - we're going to be doing part 2 next week - so while if you think you still need more reflection, then yes, answer more questions but make sure you aren't simply using it as a form of procrastination. We've got to remember that reflection is more than just filling in a lot of questions and more about really looking back.
The three questions I've selected for myself are:
What was your biggest accomplishment of the year?
What life domain did you spend the most time in? Which life domain would you have liked to?
What were the books that the biggest impact on you over the year?
I think as you saw earlier the answers to some of these questions already started answering themselves for me. And that is a bit by design. Those first exercises are there to help jump-start our brains into this reflection mode. When I answer my accomplishments question I can just look over what I've done this year. When I go to answer the domains question, I've already done the hard part of putting all that information together. My books question is a bit of the odd one out here, but reading is an important part of my life (despite my dyslexia) and so I kind of felt I had to include it (I mean I read like 30 books and I'd like to think I got something out of that).
Keep in mind that your questions are also going to be the ones that speak to you and so if you've got other questions that are better for you, use those. I'm a collector of good questions so tweet me @HackingYourADHD if you do use your own, I'd love to hear them.
As I mentioned a few times in this episode, next week we are going to be going over planning our year - so that means you should keep the materials from this week someplace you can find them because they are going to be handy when we get into planning.
This Episode’s Top Tips
List out your goals for 2019 and see which ones you completed (and it's okay if you didn't get them all - I didn't hit many of mine this year)
Go through your calendar week by week and find all the things that you've forgotten about over the year
Separate everything you did this year into their various life domains so you can see where you've spent most of your time
Using all the information you gathered, spend some time writing and reflecting on how your year went
Keep all this information handy for next week when we start planning our year
