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Edition #253 – December 20th, 2024
​A newsletter by Anne-Laure Le Cunff​

🔬 The Power of the Annual Review

As the end of the year rolls around, it’s tempting to hit pause on everything. Between holiday preparations, end-of-year deadlines, and social commitments, the thought of adding one more task to your plate might seem overwhelming.

The last thing you want to do is sit down and think about the past year… You’d rather curl up with a warm drink and switch your brain off until January. But what if this winding-down period was actually the perfect moment for something transformative?

An annual review is a chance to reflect, process, and set the stage for the future. It’s about taking a step back to see how far you’ve come and where you might like to go. In fact, it’s one of the best opportunities for personal growth. Let’s explore why it’s so powerful and how you can make it work for you.

5 Reasons to Conduct an Annual Review

An annual review isn’t just another task on your to-do list. It’s a gift you give to yourself, a chance to make sense of your journey and shape the path ahead — perhaps the most valuable gift you give yourself this year. Here are five reasons to make this an annual ritual:

• Self-development: Conducting an annual review gives you the chance to reflect on your progress over the past year, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and imagine interesting experiments for the year ahead.

• Wellbeing: Reviewing the past year helps you process your experiences—both positive and negative—and provides a sense of closure, reducing stress and improving your mental health. It’s like decluttering your mind, making space for new possibilities.

• Creativity: Reflecting on your accomplishments and challenges can inspire fresh ideas for approaching the coming year. Often, patterns emerge that weren’t visible when you were in the thick of things.

• Relationships: Taking time to evaluate your personal and professional relationships allows you to strengthen connections, resolve lingering conflicts, and pursue new friendships. You might notice which relationships energized you and which ones need more attention.

• Motivation: Recognizing and celebrating your achievements helps boost your motivation and build confidence as you move forward, so you can remember what worked well when things might get tough in the future.

When you conduct an annual review, you’re not just reflecting on the past; you’re equipping yourself with insights and tools to create a more intentional future. It can transform how you approach the coming year. And these benefits also compound over time as each annual review builds on the previous ones.

How to Conduct an Annual Review

There are many ways to conduct an annual review, some more structured than others. Feel free to experiment with different methods, and don’t feel like there’s a correct way to go about it. What matters most is carving out some uninterrupted time to reflect.

That being said, here are some practical steps to get started:

1) Choose an annual review method that resonates with you. This can be free-flow writing, filling out a structured template, or following along with a workshop video by one of your favorite creators. Don’t overthink it — the best method is the one you’ll actually use. Here are some methods:

• ​Ness Labs Year in Review Template​
• ​Building a Second Brain Annual Review​
• ​YearCompass Booklet​

2) Find a quiet space and make yourself comfortable. Turn off notifications and let the people you live with know that you need this time for yourself. Make yourself a cup of tea. Put some relaxing music on. You don’t need a full day to conduct an annual review. While 2-3 hours is ideal, even 30 minutes with a structured template can be incredibly valuable.

3) Complete your annual review by combining both intuition and evidence. Think about key moments, lessons learned, and patterns you’ve noticed. While your gut feelings are important, also do some “archaeology work” by reviewing your notes and calendars. This helps avoid recency bias — the tendency to overemphasize recent events while forgetting earlier experiences.

If you stop here, you’ve already done something wonderful for yourself. But if you’re feeling brave, consider sharing your review as an exercise in learning in public. By doing so, you might connect with others who share your experience and find inspiration in their stories.

An annual review isn’t just about looking back; it’s about reflecting on the past to reimagine your future. Use it to identify areas of curiosity, questions you’d like to explore, and experiments you might want to try. Think of it as creating a map of possibility, an exercise that could lead to new adventures.

Whatever your achievements this year, however life unfolded, remember to rest and recharge. The insights from your annual review will be waiting to guide you when you’re ready to restart your journey next year.

🛠️ Brain Tool

This week we interviewed the founder of Roots, a mobile app designed to set boundaries with your phone and make time for the things you love. We talked about how to find balance in the digital world, how to build an intentional relationship with technology, how gamification can help us stick with our intentions, and much more.

⚡ Brain Picks

• Declutter your mind and connect with yourself with a free live journaling session. Jo Franco, seasoned journaler, traveler, and founder of JoClub, will guide a free two-hour workshop on Dec 21st teaching the foundations of journaling for clarity and growth. You will leave the session with a broader sense of self-awareness. Sign up today.

• Declutter your inbox in seconds by using a newsletter aggregator built for reading. Your inbox wasn’t built for reading. Meco helps you move your newsletters to a space built for reading and declutter your reading experience in seconds. Get started.

• Declutter your online research by receiving curated articles from top publications and thought leaders. Every day, Refind analyzes thousands of articles and sends you only the best, tailored to your interests. Subscribe here.

Many thanks to our partners for supporting the newsletter. Want to feature your product here? Email joe@nesslabs.com 💌

🤝 Brain Trust

If you enjoy the newsletter, you'll love our community of curious minds who grow together through interactive workshops and safe discussion spaces. Here is preview of what’s happening in the next month:
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• From New Year Resolutions to New Year Experiments. Tired of resolutions that don’t work? Join me for this interactive workshop on Jan 7th to design a personal experiment and approach the new year from a place of curiosity.
​• Starting the Year on the Right Foot. Join Gosia Fricze for one hour of self-reflection on Jan 6th where she’ll walk you through a series of reflective questions to define what you want more of in 2025 and specific actions to explore your ambitions with intention.​
• Mastering your Creative Processes. In this session, Isabell Schäfer will help you figure out where your personal strengths lie within the creative process and the stumbling blocks that often come with them.
​• Holiday Focused Time. Want to make sure of the quiet holiday time to finish a creative project or write up your annual review? Join this 2-hour coworking session with 25-minute Pomodoros and 5-minute breaks hosted by Javier Luis Gomez on Dec 26th.
​• Quiet Self-Paced Learning. The end of the year is a great time to learn something new just for the sake of curiosity. Take one of our courses with exclusive worksheets and exercises, all from the comfort of our online community.

All of these and future events are included in the price of the annual membership ($49), as well as access to the recordings of all our previous sessions and a growing collection of case studies.

🌊 Brain Waves

Have a friend who wants to make the most of their mind? Send them the newsletter using your unique referral link below and unlock Reflective Minds, a database of good questions from great thinkers and creators.

Until next year, take care!
Anne-Laure.

P.S. Here are 9 prompts to reconnect with your curiosity – maybe you’d like to explore them as part of your annual review :)