Annual reviews are often thought about in the context of work. But doing an annual review of your own life gives you an excellent chance to look back on the year.
Reviewing our performance helps us improve and excel. To best achieve these goals, year-end reviews should be fun and energizing, as well as insightful. They should help us remember positives we’d forgotten about and see patterns we’d overlooked. (Think Spotify’s Wrapped, not your performance review at your least favorite job ever.)
Introducing an element of fun can enrich your year-end review, and make it more valuable and enjoyable. Introducing humor and light-heartedness helps us be vulnerable, authentic, and open, and makes our insights more emotionally resonant.
How to Structure Your Annual Review in a Fun, Novel Way
The review process I’ll outline here is fun, but it’s also a powerful tool for identifying patterns and extracting lessons. Every achievement, whether small or monumental, contributes to your overall trajectory toward excellence. Celebrating your wins, big and small, and your growth, is a powerful tool for staying motivated and reinforcing a mindset of continuous improvement.
Start by picking an interest you’re passionate about—whether it’s movies, travel, fitness, or something else—and create 6-8 awards based on that theme. These awards will be fun, but they also highlight key achievements and insights from your year. Here are some examples to get you started.
The Travel Enthusiast
The awards:
- Hidden Gem Award (Underrated Success): Recognize a small win or overlooked achievement that turned out to be surprisingly meaningful.
- Journey of the Year (Most Impactful Personal Growth): Celebrate a major life experience where you learned, evolved, or grew significantly.
- Passport Stamp Milestone (New Experiences): Recall the most exciting “first” you experienced, whether it was trying a new hobby, visiting a new place, or achieving a big goal.
- Unexpected Detour Award (Turning Challenges Into Opportunities): Reflect on a challenge that initially felt like a setback but ultimately led to something positive or valuable.
- Travel Itinerary Master (Best Planning or Organizing Achievement): Reward yourself for pulling off a well-executed project, event, or life plan.
- Postcard Moment (Most Memorable Experience): Think of the moment you’d feature on a postcard if your year were a trip. What memory stands out as iconic or unforgettable?
The Fitness Lover
The awards:
- Biggest Elevation Gain (Growth Through Adversity): Reflect on how you “climbed” through difficulties and came out stronger.
- Consistency Streak (Showing Up): Reward yourself for consistent efforts, whether in fitness, learning, or relationships.
- Best Post-Workout Caption (Storytelling and Reflection): Recall moments that made for the best stories or memories, even if they weren’t major wins.
- Cross-Training Hero: For learning a new skill outside your usual routine.
- Strongest Lift (Metaphorical): For carrying a heavy responsibility well.
- Best Workout Playlist: For creating the perfect motivational environment.
The Movie Lover
The awards:
- Sleeper Hit: For an experience that exceeded expectations.
- Best Supporting Role: For helping someone else succeed (or whoever helped you).
- Plot Twist of the Year: For an unexpected event that reshaped your year.
- Breakout Star: For excelling in a new area of life (or a friend/teammate who became more important).
- Best Original Story: For creating something unique.
- Special Effects Award: For upgrading your environment or style.
- Best Director: For organizing or managing a successful event.
Implementation Tips
- To save time and effort when coming up with the awards categories, you can feed the examples given here into an AI tool and ask it to come up with awards categories for your choice of interest.
- If you’d prefer, you can choose your favorite app to base the awards categories on, rather than another type of interest. Base the awards categories on fun features of the app.
- Consider assigning experiences to the awards categories as a voice recording. Use an app that will transcribe your recording. This is less effortful and involves less pressure than writing your answers, but provides the same benefits of having your answers to look back on.
- I recommend that your annual review include at least three positive points or questions for every negative one. This will keep the overall experience from being too self-critical.
Variations
- Gift version: You can create a gift version of this annual review for someone you know very well but who is hard to buy for. Write awards categories for them based on their biggest passion, and make answering them a shared event with a focus on that person.
- Social version: Try this annual review with someone you know well. Create the awards categories, then answer for yourself and each other, and compare what you said about yourself with what they said about you. Other people sometimes have insights about us we hadn’t seen or memories we’d forgotten.
- Team version: Try a work-appropriate version of this exercise with your work team based on your shared work rather than your individual experiences. Shared reviews can foster team cohesion, mentorship, and mutual celebration in professional settings.
Benefits
- This type of review fosters numerous valuable psychological skills, including creativity, positivity, storytelling, re-framing, self-knowledge of your strengths, and pattern recognition.
- Our peak experiences are important memories and you can use your reflections as inspiration for setting ambitious but meaningful goals for the coming year.
- The fun element of this review can help you process your memories from the year more openly and less defensively. Humor helps us be vulnerable. Making your review fun will make it easier to claim both your wins and your losses.
Try this review yourself and share it with someone who you think would benefit from celebrating their wins.
This article was inspired by the poker-themed awards given in this episode of the “Risky Business” podcast.