(Last Updated on Mar 20, 2024)

The earth has completed yet another revolution around the sun. And it has started on yet another one (how could I not use a pun on this one!).

It’s time to put up that brand new 2024 calendar. Every year, a new calendar would come home. It would end up on the side of the fridge or one of the wardrobes in the bedroom. Like the newspaper, this has been replaced by digital calendars now which are available at our fingertips. At best, we have some desk calendars now which actually have the primary purpose of being a photo album!

The unique thing about this calendar was that it also had the Malayalam calendar and important dates marked along-side the Gregorian one. Strangely enough, the Malayalam year starts on the first day of the Chingam month, which comes around August 15th. But wait a minute, isn’t Vishu the Malayalam new year? Vishu, the first day of the Medam month which falls around April 14th, used to be the traditional start of the new year before the current Malayalam calendar (the one with Aug 15th as the new year) was started in the year 825 CE.

Different cultures had developed their own ways of tracking the seasons and revolutions around the sun. The most interesting one we’ve seen on our travels has been the one in Egypt – a calendar that was designed around the Nile river’s water levels.

Wherever you are in the world and whichever calendar you follow, there are some things which are common. The start of a calendar year is seen as an opportunity to start afresh and set goals for the new year. It is a time for new year resolutions and manifesting what you have always wanted. Some people are successful in meeting their own expectations, a majority fall short as life gets in the way.

I’ve never really been big on resolutions. I’ve tried them in the past but never really made it past February or March. So, I changed the approach about 4 years back. In the new mental model, the end of the year acts as a milestone for introspection. This presents an excellent opportunity to take a pause and look at various aspects of life in detail. 

Being a big-time productivity nerd, I’ve tried out different models to create the perfect “Annual Review” format. In this blog, I’ll cover some of the TOOLS that have really helped me over the years.

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1. The Building Blocks of Life

The framework that I currently use looks at life as a bunch of building blocks (in no particular order)

Family	Friends
Work	Finance
Marriage	Health
Kids	Holidays

For each of these, there is:
– 5-year vision
– 1-2 goals for the year
– Projects which will add up into the goal

The projects are then broken into daily and weekly activities with dedicated time slots on the calendar – this is done to ensure that life does not “get in the way”. And by “life”, most of us mean “work”. That one bucket dominates most of our lives and eats into a lot of precious time that we may want to spend on ourselves or with family. Using this framework makes you acutely aware of what you want to spend time doing and orients you to focus your energies. After all, what is life if the “living” part is missing?

This is best done if you have an accountability partner – in my case, Nam. It helps to have a partner to review the goals – one or two times during the year would be ideal to course-correct if needed.

The first year was quite horrible, to be honest. We both missed a lot of our ideal goals as “work” dominated our lives. This was before our son was born and was a wake-up call that we needed to be more balanced – especially with respect to our health, finances and family time. Over a period of time, we managed to set in place a lot of systems that didn’t leave our goals at the mercy of our memory. While we haven’t reached a 10/10 on any of the goals yet, we have steadily made the journey from 5/10 to 7/10.

2. Putting the calendar to use

Our brains can be quite poor at remembering things at the right time since we are already assaulted with an overload of information all the time. Sticky notes didn’t really help – it was tough to find a piece of paper and pen all the time. So, the best option was – Google Calendar. I always had my phone on me. As soon as I remember something and don’t want to forget it, I add a task in the calendar for the date I want a reminder on. It is a foolproof way to ensure that you don’t miss important events – whether it is birthdays and anniversaries, bill payments for electricity or EMIs or even a reminder to take a break and go on a date. 

3. Habit tracker apps/boards

I had written about this in the blog about my weight training journey. For projects that require habit formation, it helps to have a method to track the adherence to the habit. It could be a habit tracker app or even a notice board with a weekly check-list format where you can tick-off the dates when you performed the activity. It may not seem like a lot when you start off. But after 5-6 months, it feels amazing to look at the journey you’ve made – showing up week after week and building a better version of yourself.

4. Understanding your own brain

While this is not necessarily a “Tool” in the sense of that word, it should be one! It is easy to set ambitious goals – and if you’re like me, you’ll end up taking 10 goals at the same time. Given the average human’s capacity to learn new things (it doesn’t help that it deteriorates with age), you can do 2-3 new things at best – especially if you are aiming to make it a part of life!

I realized this the hard way and modified my approach – I picked only 2-3 goals. But that didn’t stimulate me enough and I ended up doing nothing. So, with trial and error, I figured out that my brain needs a wide buffet of activities to pick from. Based on my bandwidth and interest levels, I zero-in on any 2-3 of them and go really deep into it. And that has become my approach.

The most important thing I’ve discovered over the course of this experimentation is that you need to develop the ability to take it easy on yourself. Setting 10 goals and achieving 3 of them is a 30% success rate – not very impressive. But on the flip-side, had I not done the exercise to begin with, I would have been at ZERO. So, I always count it as 3 steps forward! 

So, what’s the plan for 2024? We’ve been travelling, so the yearly exercise hasn’t happened yet. That’s another thing – just because you have a system, doesn’t mean you need to be neurotic about it. The system is there to help you, not to make you a slave of it. I have a few top goals in mind:

• Write more consistently – I re-started this blog regularly in July 2023 and wrote for 22 weeks. Hopefully I can put one out every single week this year.
• Health – I’ve been reading a lot about exercise and diet in the last one year and making a ton of notes. I’m planning to put some of these into action and experiment. That journey will be covered in my blogs.
• Figure out avenues to share my experience – 2023 was awesome for me on this front as I got opportunities to share my learnings with a large bunch of people. I got to conduct workshops, take guest lectures and even put together a course on Business Analytics. I am really looking forward to this area.

What systems do you use for introspection – do share your thoughts in the comments!

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