Love it or hate it New Year’s Eve will divide most groups of friends or colleagues a bit like marmite. I love it as it provides a perfect time to take stock formally on how the current year has been from a holistic work/life balance perspective.

 Some people will argue why wait until the end of the year to review progress and they would be right, in an ideal world a high performer will be having regular checkpoints throughout the twelve months to ensure everything is on track. A more thorough review exercise is still however really valuable on an annual basis similar to the performance appraisals we come across in business life.

So how did you do in 2015? How are you going to review the year do you have a structured approach? The method isn’t that important it’s the discipline of the exercise which I find powerful and encourages continual personal growth and development.

 I have kept a few personal development journals over the years and these little books are great for reviewing at this time of year. In these journals are rough goal setting exercises, reviews of prior years in narrative and tabular formats. I haven’t really had a consistent structure as the process has gradually been streamlined in recent years.

 On previous New Year’s eves I have listed various elements of my life such as work,family,relationship,friends,health,spiritual,financial,social etc. and given them a score out of 10. Looking back on these tables now the categories show very different scores with some significant areas of improvement which is good to see a reward for some key decisions taken and action put into place in prior years.

 A few years ago I changed the format into a more narrative account of what had happened in the year and I did this every 6 months. For certain areas of my life I did specify some particular goals I wanted to achieve or events I wanted to attend.

 For the past two years as well as writing an account of the year I also set myself the challenge of identifying just one single goal to focus on for each year and this approach has worked well.

So today on my to-do list is to journal my review of 2015 and tomorrow I will write down my area of focus for 2016.