About the Annual Review 💁‍♂️

Based on Alex Vermeer's 8,760 hours guide 🙏

"This year will be different"

Alright, buddy. Maybe it will. But did you know that fewer than half of all resolutions are successful? (That's actually somehow more than you would expect.)

A once-a-year review is a marshmallow test for the soul. Delay the gratification, reflect on your life, and plan for success.

Extraordinary individuals stand out in the extent to which they reflect — often explicitly — on the events of their lives, large as well as small…

Howard Gardner

Meet the Life Areas

This guide takes you through no fewer than 12 'Life Areas' - a set of mutually exclusive and (ideally) collectively exhaustive aspects of your life. Instead of just reflecting on whatever happened most recently this acts as a forcing function to consider what you would otherwise skip over.

These Life Areas come directly form Alex Vermeer´s 8,760 hours guide (named after the 8,760 hours in a year). His approach & standard questions are also mostly incorporated into this guide. If you prefer, you can download his PDF for a similar, yet offline, version of this exercise.

Goals vs Systems

When you reach the planning phase, you will be prompted to define both goals and systems.

This takes a note out of Scott Adams's book, who so rudely tells us that "Goals are for losers", explaining that:

"Goals work great for simple situations. But the world is rarely simple these days ... And that means your odds of picking the one best goal for you are slim, and the odds of achieving it are even slimmer, because everything is a moving target"

Scott Adams

Adams favours systems that improve your odds of success.

However, the conversation doesn't stop with "Alright, let's forget the language of goals" as pointed out by Nat Eliason in his article Systems Without Goals is a Path to Mediocrity: "We can’t discuss what it means to improve a system without some idea of what improvement means".

The 'solution', if one was ever needed, is best explained by James Clear:

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results… Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

James Clear in Atomic Habits

A few words of wisdom

  1. Set new & ambitious goals for yourself but don't be a cliche. You're not the first to think that taking cold showers will radically change your life and you definitely won't be the first to realize it wasn't a sustainable route to Shangri-La.
  2. Favor the system that works. Maybe 3 CrossFit sessions a day and a diet consisting entirely of Icelandic yoghurt would be 'ideal', but you'll be stacking the deck against yourself. Rig the game in your favour with a modest system that you can stick to.
  3. When accessorizing always take off the last thing you put on. Having to assess 12 Life Areas doesn't imply you should expect to complete 12+ major projects. When you look at your plan for the next year, remove at least 1 goal/system/project.
  4. Respect Chesteron's fence: "Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place".
  5. Savor, don't swallow. Make room and time for deep work; avoid book summaries and audiobooks played at 2x speed.

🔐 A note on Privacy

Full privacy, few features. All your answers are stored directly in your browser. They are not transferred unencrypted to a server and sold for cheap to your ex-girlfriends - see for yourself by inspecting the code. This also means that you can't complete this on multiple laptops or in different browsers.

There is no logging-in or any other nice services. Sit down, take the time, complete the exercise, and then move on.