Annual Review Template: How to Review Your Year and Plan the Next

What an Annual Review Is For

An annual review looks at what the year actually held before you decide what you want from the next one. It is the top layer of a personal review system, and if you do quarterly reviews, most of the material is already written. If you do not, you can still build a useful review from your calendar and your memory.

A good annual review ends in two things: a short written summary of the year, and a small number of priorities for the first quarter of the next one.

Before You Start

Pick a time when you will not be interrupted, and decide where your notes will live. Gather your calendar for the year, any quarterly or weekly notes, and photos or messages that jog your memory. If you want a snapshot of how each area of life feels right now, the free Wheel of Life tool takes a couple of minutes.

This article suggests questions about health, rest and money. They are prompts for reflection, not health or financial advice; for anything medical or financial, a professional is the right person to ask.

Step 1: Walk Through the Year

Go month by month through your calendar and list what stands out: things you finished, things you started, changes, trips, hard stretches, people. Aim for a page of plain notes, not polished writing. Then answer two questions in a few lines each:

1. What are the five moments I would want to remember?
2. What were the hardest stretches, and what helped or did not?

Step 2: Go Through the Eight Dimensions

For each dimension, rate how the year felt from 1 to 10, then answer the question beside it. Skip any that do not apply; the aim is to be sure nothing quietly disappeared.

Dimension	A question to ask
Health	What did I do for my body this year that I want to carry forward, and what do I want to talk through with a professional?
Mind	What did I learn about how I think and feel, and what helped on difficult days?
Relationships	Who did I spend real time with, and who do I want to make more time for?
Work	What did I build or finish, and what drained me more than it was worth?
Finances	What changed in my money situation, and is there anything I want to look at with a professional?
Learning	What did I learn or get better at, and what do I want to learn next?
Rest	When did I actually recover, and what got in the way of resting?
Purpose	When did my days feel meaningful, and what was I doing then?

For how to read a rating and compare it year to year, see the wheel of life explained. For a deeper one-off look at where you stand, see how to do a life audit.

Step 3: Find the Themes

Read your notes and ratings back and look for patterns. Two or three themes are enough, such as "I did my best work in short focused blocks" or "the months I saw friends regularly felt better." Write each theme as a sentence. A theme is an observation; you do not need to fix it.

A useful extra question: what did not happen that I expected to, and what does that say about the plan? Treat this as information. A goal that did not get done often points at something about the goal, its size or its timing, rather than at a flaw in you.

Step 4: Choose a Theme and a Few Priorities

Instead of a long resolution list, pick a theme for the next year and one to three priorities. A theme is a short phrase that points the year, for example "steady", "close to people" or "finish things". Priorities are the concrete areas where you will put attention. Everything else keeps ticking over without new targets.

Make each priority specific: what you want, the first step, and when and where you will do it. Goal-setting research (Locke and Latham, 2002) finds that specific goals tend to lead to better performance than vague ones, mostly in workplaces, and plans that say when and where help too (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). If you like measurable results, personal OKRs by life dimension shows one way to write them.

Step 5: Break Up the First Quarter

A year is too big to plan in detail. Write only the first quarter: what you will do in the first month, the first step for each priority, and the date of your first quarterly review. Put those dates in your calendar before you close the document.

Doing It in Xenith

Xenith does not run the review for you. It keeps the ratings and entries you make.

• Life Dimensions: weekly 1 to 10 ratings with a four-week trend. See Life Dimensions.
• Reflection: daily entries with a five-level mood and searchable history, useful for the month-by-month walk-through. See Reflection Journal.
• Insights: a balance radar of your ratings. See Insights.

The dimension view in the app covers recent weeks rather than a whole year, so for the yearly comparison keep your own table of ratings from each review.

Keep It Light

If the review feels heavy, split it: do the look-back one evening and the planning another day. The goal is a short summary and a few clear priorities, not a perfect document. Save the page where you will find it next year, so next year's review can start by reading this one.

Frequently Asked Questions