Annual Reflection Pages 🌟
Free PDF pages from the Annual Planner to help you reflect on the year that's passed and the year yet to come
It’s almost the end of the year and so I wanted to make some of the reflection sections from my Annual Planner available to download. I love it when the tools I create are useful to people besides just myself, and I hope that making these available will mean that someone out there will find them and use them!
I’ve created PDFs for three sections: Year in Review, Plan Your Year, and the January Pages.
Year in Review
The Year in Review appears at the very end of the planner, and follows the same format as the planner’s monthly check-ins: a “battery” section followed by a series of reflection questions. It asks you to look back at the year that’s wrapping up and reflect on how it went.
Why batteries?
The batteries in this section are an adaptation of the dashboard from Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I loved their idea, and wanted to expand it to include more granular areas of life. I added a few “fill in the blank” batteries at the bottom, which I use for additional things I want to pay attention to. For instance, when I wanted to spend more time reading for pleasure, I added a “Reading fiction” battery.
When I consider how much to color in one of the battery indicators, I ask myself:
How energized and “full” am I feeling in this area of my life, or how depleted?
A depleted battery means that things are out of balance somehow, but it doesn’t prescribe how – for instance, either too much or too little travel could cause my “travel” battery to run low. Similarly, my “work” battery could be full because work is effortless and fun, or because work is challenging and demanding, yet rewarding.
When I look at long-term trends in my reflections, I’m primarily interested in knowing if there are areas I need to pay more attention to in order to potentially make changes. Even though the “fullness” of a battery is hard to quantify or objectively describe, it meets this need better than anything else I’ve come across. If I see that month after month a certain battery is low, it suggests to me that I need to make a conscious change in that area. On the other hand, if an area is consistently full, it suggests that whatever I’m doing (or not doing!) is working.
Plan Your Year
Plan Your Year is the first section in the planner. It starts by broadly considering your values, superpowers, and preferences, and then hones into what your intentions are for the year to come. There actually aren’t any questions that focus on implementing these intentions in this section — those come in the January section when we look at more specific plans for the first quarter broadly and for January specifically. This section ends with a very casual five-year calendar, which is a place to jot down any important milestones or plans you have in the coming few years. It has the most space for the first year, since it’s closest, and shrinks to smaller spaces for future years.
January Pages
Finally, there are the January Pages! January is the beginning of the first quarter, so it starts with quarterly planning pages. These ask specific questions to help make the previous section’s broad intentions actionable. Then, the pages for January itself start with the same batteries as the Year in Review and a similar set of reflection questions.
The main difference between the January Pages and the Year in Review is that I try to look back at the year as a whole when completing the Year in Review section. On the other hand, when I fill out a monthly section, I treat it like a snapshot from this particular moment in time. It’s really helpful to have twelve of these snapshots to look back at when I’m reviewing my year — I find that my memory is incredibly unreliable, and looking at my actual notes from each month gives me a different understanding of my year than what I come up with when I imagine how the last year went. Nevertheless, if you’re just getting started, an imagined past year is certainly better than nothing, so you can jump in right away even without months to look back at.
Downloads
You can view and download the PDFs here (for free, no strings attached):
If you’d like a hard copy of the entire Annual Planner, you can buy one here.
I hope you enjoy!