Questions that help me review the past year

The beginning of the year is always a tough one for me. Ever since I started RNG, it’s always difficult to really mark the start of the year for me for various reasons. My shoots sometimes can clash with the festive period and span across many days and through the new year and by the time January comes around, a lot of the time I only found time to slow down and really take stock of the previous year. 

 So the first three months of the year is typically when I reflect and take stock of what the past year has given me. I have been doing a method that I picked up from Tim Ferriss which is to scan through my calendar and go through all notable events — be it work or personal — and put them into two columns, positive and negative. Life-affirming and Life-draining.  

I have yet to do it this year because it has been a non-stop hectic pace but perhaps tomorrow might be a good time for this. Apart from this method, I’ve also picked up something new from a podcast interviewing Austin Kleon. 

This one is a little different, it is more of a perspective element rather than a prescriptive one. He speaks about how he questions and no longer subscribes to the idea that our lives are linear.  He speaks of the flawed metaphors that we unknowingly takes as gospel and uses in our day to day and one of them being how many people are brought up to think about life being linear. 

Instead, he offers the idea of life being a cyclical one, where it’s frenetic at certain periods and almost hibernative in other times.  Perhaps this can be something that I notice through my scanning of my events and energy levels throughout the past year. 

There are also a few questions I picked up that I want to jot down here to ask myself during this reflective exercise: 

 - What am I optimising for? 

- How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? 

- What am I not saying or doing that needs to be said or done?  

May this provide a reminder and guide for myself to be more conscious in my decisions this year.