Make 2024 the Year You Achieve All Your Goals (Yearly Review & Goal Setting Guide)

Introduction

Do you ever wonder why you're so excited to set goals for the new year or new year's resolutions at the beginning of the year, and think to yourself "new year new me" but come December you've either forgotten about your goals and definitely haven't achieved them?

So you set them again for the next year. But it still doesn't happen. It's probably down to one of these reasons:

• You set too many goals at once: our working memory has a limit of around five and nine items. If you set too many goals for yourself, you're not going to remember them let alone act on all of them. You're going to spread yourself too thin and dilute your efforts.
• You underestimate how much you can achieve in a year: a year is a long time, don't get me wrong, but if you want to do all the things to get from where you are now to where you want to be, you might be overestimating how much you can actually achieve in a year. That's not to say don't be ambitious, but be wary of the planning fallacy, which is the cognitive bias in which you underestimate the time it takes for something and overestimate the chances of success.
• You don't regularly review your goals: if you are not regularly reviewing your goals, and tracking progress, as well as adjusting your course of action to ensure you are on the right track, how do you know if you've made progress in achieving them and what you should be doing to stay on track?
• You have limiting beliefs: our mind plays tricks on us saying you possibly can't achieve that goal, it's an evolutionary protection mechanism to keep us stuck and in our comfort zone. Change is hard, and you're not used to it. This is why you fall back to your old habits.
• Your environment isn't right: you have a negative or unsupportive environment that is not set up for success. If your goal is to quit alcohol, but you keep going to bars or events where there is plenty of alcohol, you're very likely to give in and it is so much harder to stick to not drinking than to completely remove yourself from that environment.

Yes that's me!

If you've answered yes to any of the points above, then stay tuned. In this article, I will cover the framework I use to set effective goals for the new year in a way you will actually achieve them at the end of the year.

Say goodbye to years of setting goals and never achieving them.

This is my process for reviewing the past year and setting goals for the new year. I recommend you do this either at the end of the current year or at the beginning of a new year.

The importance of yearly review

The first step is to do a yearly review. This is very important as it will allow you to reflect on your past year and naturally identify areas that are important to you to give you food for thought on what to focus on for the new year.

Reflecting on the past year will highlight areas you did well and areas you need to focus on.

I will cover my framework on setting specific and system-oriented goals which you will track monitor progress throughout the year to ensure that you keep yourself accountable and stay on top of your goals. You will actually follow them through all the way to the end of the year and actually achieve them.

Say goodbye to another set of New Year's resolutions which go down the drain after the first week of January.

I've made a whole video on this outlining the full process you if you prefer to watch that, here it is below:

Part 1: Review & reflection of the past year

The first thing is to review the past year and reflect on the events and experiences of the past year. This allows you an opportunity to reflect on everything you have been through this past year, to celebrate the achievements, and to identify areas of focus for the new year.

Answer the questions below by writing them down either on a piece of paper or a Word document, or if you use Notion, you can duplicate my Notion template into your own workspace and answer the questions on there.

Yearly Review & Goal Setting Notion Template

Duplicate this into your own workspace so you can work through the exercise and write down answers of your own.

Get Notion Template

1.1 Monthly breakdown

1. Review your monthly reviews for the year. Reflect on your experiences and accomplishments over the past year. 💭
2. Look through your camera roll to relive the memories you made over the past year. 📸
3. Appreciate the good memories and be proud that you overcame the difficult moments – what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. 💪

If you don't do monthly reviews yet, I strongly encourage you to start doing them. This is a way to keep yourself accountable so that you can monitor progress and adjust your strategies as you go along.

Another thing I have started doing is taking regular photos in my camera roll, so that I can capture the good memories. It's so easy to focus on the negatives (as our minds are designed to protect us from danger) but doing this allows you to remember and relive the good moments you had throughout the year.

1.2 Memories

Write down your top three memories of the past year and take a moment to reflect on them.

This forces your brain to think of what went well during the year and an opportunitity to express gratitude. Especially if you have been too busy during the year to actually sit down and think about the journey you've been through, now is the time to actually reflect on these.

1.3 Daily habits

1. What daily habits are you following currently?
2. What daily habits would you like to work on going forward? Be kind to yourself for the ones you are slacking on — is there any way you can make the habits easier, or reconnect to your why?

Think of habits which are such that by doing them, you are automatically likely to head towards the person you want to be.

1.4 Review of goals

1. Now review your goals for the past year. Did you achieve your end-of-year vision? If so, take a moment to celebrate your achievement. 🎉
2. If you didn’t achieve your goal, review and reflect. Is this goal still a priority for you? What changes can you make to move forward? ✍️

1.5 Career review

Use the annual career review tool from 80,000 hours to review your career. Are there any insights from this you can take away?

Annual career review tool

This tool asks you a couple of questions to help you: Reflect on the past year Consider whether to change job Make a plan for the coming year We encourage people to do a quick review of their career plans about once a year. Annually is frequent enough to pick up important changes in your situation without too much delay, but infrequent enough to avoid spending too much time planning rather than doing. If you work through this tool, then your review for this year is done. All questions are optional.

80,000 HoursRoman Duda

This is a tool I found online which allows you to audit your career and to evaluate whether you are on the right path, or whether you need to re-evaluate and adjust. It may help you provide some ideas on what goals to set for the new year.

1.6 Vision planning

Take a moment to go through the vision planning exercise. Create clarity on the future you want to create for yourself.

This is a detailed exercise on thinking about who your ideal version of yourself will be. It allows you to contrast between where you are now and where you'd like to be.

To do this effectively, you need some space and time to actually think about what you want for your life. So ensure you have some time available, and do it in a quiet distraction free environment where you can really get immersed into the exercise. Be specific and realistic about your vision. This ideal version of you should excite you and will give you opportunity to align your goals with this future vision.

1.7 Things to implement

Review the things that are on your implement list. What can you focus on going forward?

If you don't yet make an implement list, I encourage you to start making one. Mine is very simple. It's simply a Notion page which contains a list of things I would like to implement one day.

I group the items on the list using the Eisenhower Matrix (or the urgent-important matrix), which is a task management system to prioritise the tasks by urgency and importance, to help me decide which ones to focus on next. I will make a full guide on how I use my implement list coming up– stay tuned.

Part 2: Setting new goals for the year

Use the yearly goals framework below to set new goals and intentions for the upcoming year.

2.1 Pick 3–5 goals for the upcoming year

Don’t exceed this as it will give you too many areas to focus on and your focus and efforts will become diluted. A few but very important goals that you are committed to will increase your chances of achieving them, rather than having a long list of ideal outcomes which only overwhelms you.

At this point just pick areas of focus, as we will use the second exercise below to dial down on the specifics of the goal. For example your areas of focus might be: health, personal finances and career.

The yearly review you have just completed should give you ideas on what areas you need to focus on for the coming year. This is why completing the yearly review is essential.

It's very important to not exceed more areas of focus than 3-5 since having too many wil overwhelm you and you will not only forget them but loose sight of what is truly important. The beauty in this exercise is it allows you to narrow down what the most important areas in your life are. You can't work on 10 things at once anyway and you definetely won't achieve them all in a year– you will spread yourself too thin and dilute all your efforts. Don't make the same mistakes you have kept making in the past.

2.2 Refining your goals

Now for each of the areas of focus above, go through this exercise and write them down. Writing them down makes your goals tangible and more real. It is also part of being able to regularly review them so that you can monitor and track progress.

I use Notion for this (get my Notion template), however, you can use a planner, journal, notebook, word document or even paper! Anything works but writing them down solidifies them rather than it just being in your imagination!

For each goal write down:

1. Goal: what is the goal you want to have achieved by the end of the year? Include up to 3 key results that are measurable. Make them ambitious but achievable. This should be such that by meeting your key results, you will have met the goal. It gives you something specific and tangible to strive towards.
2. Why: why do you want to achieve this goal? How would your life look like if you achieve this, and how would it look like if you don’t achieve this goal? This is the idea of mental contrasting, which compares where you are now to where you will end up if you take action and where you will end up if you don't take action.
1. Inspiration: what is your inspiration for achieving this goal? Give examples of people who have achieved this goal. You may want to include pictures or videos to keep you motivated when you are not feeling it. This may not apply for some things, so skip if not applicable.
2. Habits: what are the regular habits and actions you need to implement in order to achieve this goal? These are the actions you will implement to ensure that you achieve your goal.
3. Obstacles: what obstacles may get in your way of achieving this goal? What will you do if you encounter these obstacles? This is a game changer, as it allows you to identify things you know will get in the way and thus you can either change your mindset, your environment or your actions to overcome these obstacles.

2.3 Solidifying your goals

By going through this framework, you will have hyper-focused, super specific goals which are personal to you and for you to focus on for this year. You will know exactly when you have achieved them, what you need to do and what might get in the way. This is beautiful. Are you excited to actually achieve all your goals this year?

Now you know this already but doing this exercise isn't enough. You now need to actually take the actions necessarily, implement those habits and track regularly to monitor your progress and readjust your course of action as needed. I do this through regular weekly and monthly reviews.

Weekly reviews allow you to reflect on your week and think about how it went, what you did well and what to focus on for the upcoming week and monthly reviews are more zoomed out and allows you to see progress more clearly. Since there are only 12 months in a year, in each monthly review you should be closer to achieving your goal than where you were before– if not, you need to readjust the direction of your sails and proceed forward.

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References:

1. Can You Improve Your Working Memory?. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-superhuman-mind/202009/can-you-improve-your-working-memory.
2. What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-the-dunning-kruger-effect-4160740.
3. Understanding the Urgent-Important matrix. Larksuite. https://www.larksuite.com/en_us/topics/productivity-glossary/urgent-important-matrix.
4. 11 tips to help you stick to your New Year’s goals. Greatist. https://greatist.com/happiness/new-year-goal-setting#stay-organized.