Goal setting. Personal growth. Professional development. I don’t know about you, but all of my social media feeds are full of how-to’s on how to better yourself for the new year.
Before hitting 2017 hard, why not take stock of all the great things that happened in your life – personally and professionally – in 2016?
Taking a cue from this article I came across in December 2015 on The Muse (and had all intentions of pursuing a year ago. Whoops.), I developed my own 2016 in review using Adobe Spark Pages and hitting on a few broad topics:
- Biggest wins
- Skills
- Notable events
- Lessons Learned
- Personal
- Goals for new year
Include what you want in your project. Quantify your achievements. Exclude personal details. Capture this in a webpage, in a document, in images, in video. Share, or don’t share (although I’d argue that you do share your accomplishments particularly if you hit on professional achievements on whatever networks you use for business, or even via email to your network – it’s a great way to let your connections know what you’ve been up to and brag about all of the great, specific things you’ve done lately).
The exercise in itself will help you articulate what you’ve accomplished and enable you to focus on what you want to do next in 2017.
For example… I’ve done a lot of writing, in terms of blog posts but also in my
9-to-5. Why not expand that skill set by taking on more freelance work this next year? Clearly I’ve managed to organize my time in a way that makes room for writing. Maybe I’ll focus on finishing other writing projects I’ve been working on of late as well. I also will need to figure out how to meet these goals using time spent on planes and in airports, as I’ll be taking many trips to visit my family this year.
Do you regularly complete a year-in-review? How has this helped you? What have you learned about yourself?
Gail Marie Cole 