Evergreen Annual Review Questions

Questions from Tim Ferriss, Shane Parrish, James Clear, Ramit Sethi, and other top performers and coaches to help you review, reflect on and re-orient your life.

Every year since 2014, I've conducted an end of year review. The practice has helped me take stock of my life, reflect on the ups and downs of the past year, and re-orient myself toward living a successful, authentic and peaceful life.

Here are 8 sets of questions which I've used in my annual review. They range from reflection questions that top performers like Tim Ferriss and James Clear ask themselves, to questions I randomly saved to my camera roll from anonymous sources, to questions posed to me by coaches I’ve worked with.

My hope is that one of the question sets piques your interest enough to set aside an hour to answer them yourself. Or even better, that you mix and match questions from different sets and combine them ones you come up with, to create your own set of annual review questions that you can add to and come back to yearly.

Question Set A

1. What 20% of activities, experiences or people produced 80% or more of your positive emotions/outcomes this past year?

2. What 20% of the activities, experiences or people produced 80% of the negative emotions/outcomes you experienced this past year?

3. If we assume there are only two emotions, love and fear, which in this moment are you feeling, or which is causing you to behave in a certain way?

4. If you could only use a $100 right now to most increase your happiness, how would you use it? What if you had $500? What about $1,000?

5. What are 3 things that you would most like to add to your life? What about 3 things you would most like to remove from your life?

6. What are the most absurd or crazy things you could do this upcoming year?

7. How can you 10x ____? (Fill in the blank with your revenue, audience, happiness, time with family, any thing you care about)

8. If I had to charge two times more, and couldn’t do any paid advertising, what would I do instead?

Source: Tim Ferriss (The Tim Ferriss Show #216: What I learned in 2016)

Question Set B

1. What are the wins, big and small, that you can celebrate from this past year?

2. What were you doing when you were achieving your best results?

3. What mistakes did you make over and over again?

4. What behaviors do you most want to change and how will you do it?

5. What are the experiences and achievements you would love to look back on this time next year?

6. What is your ONE important thing for next year? This is what you could focus most of your efforts on next year.

7. Who do you want to be in the next year? What characteristics does this new version of you have?

Source: UJ Ramdas - Creator of 5 Minute Journal (UJ Ramdas Blog: How to have an amazing 2016)

Question Set C

1. What can you give thanks for from the past year?

2. What experiences did you enjoy?

3. What can you be proud of?

4. What did you learn about your desires? Which desires will you keep next year?

5. What suffering did you face? How did it transform you?

6. When where you at your best?

7. What did you learn from the past year?

8. Who were you?

9. Which people most influenced your life in the past year?

10. What are fun, happy, amazing events you’d like to experience next year?

Source: Avthar Sewrathan

(These are questions I've thought of or more honestly, picked up and forgotten the source)

Question Set D - Short questions

1. A bad habit I’m going to break:

2. A New skill I’d like to learn:

3. A person I hope to be more like:

4. A good deed I’m going to do:

5. A place I’d like to visit:

6. A book I’d like to read:

Source: Unknown - I found this sometime in 2014/2015 and thought it was a cool, short vision setting exercise for a new year or period of life.

Question Set E

1. What did you do a lot of this year that you want to do less of next year?

2. Did you spend your time in a way that was meaningful or conscious or were you ruled by habits and defaults?

3. Did you invest in the right relationships?

4. Are you living deliberately and consciously?

5. Did you go after what you want or did you hope it would come to you?

Source: Shane Parrish (Brain Food Newsletter No. 349)

Question Set F - On Career

Imagine your career is a game:

1. What game am I playing?

2. What are the rules of the game?

3. How do the players advance?

4. How do players lose?

5. Is this game still serving me?

Source: James Clear (Twitter)

Question Set G

1. What is it time for in your life?

2. What is calling you?

3. What brings you energy and joy? How can you prioritize that in the upcoming year?

4. How can you design your life around unobstructed self-expression, rather than comparison and competition?

5. How might you become more of who you truly are?

Source: Taraneh Erfan King (Instagram)

Question Set H - On Money

1. What’s your Rich Life?

   Why do you want to be rich? What do you want to do with your wealth?

   Get really specific:

   • When you woke up, what would your schedule be? What time would you wake up? What would your house look like? (Your life can be whatever you want — get creative!)

   • What would you do for work? What would you do after work? How would you get home? Would you even have to go to the office?

   • How much money would you make? What would you do MORE of and what would you do LESS of? What would you do with that money as the ultimate extravagance?

   • What do your relationships look like? (Family, romantic and friendships)

2. Now look at how you spend your time and money from the past 4-8 weeks (it’s hard to remember beyond that, but if you can then use it!).

   Does your time and money align with #1? How might you move toward your rich life?

Source: Ramit Sethi (Website, Twitter, Instagram)