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Reflection

Year in Review

A quiet look back at the moments, people and changes that shaped your year.

Before you start

There is no right way to complete this review. Write a sentence, fill a page, skip a question or return to it later. Use it to notice what you don't want to forget.

Most year-end reviews ask you to score yourself. This one doesn’t. There are no ratings, no wheel of life and no goals framework waiting at the end.

It also doesn’t open with the hardest question. The trouble with looking back has never been the thinking — it’s that by the time you sit down, you don’t have the year with you any more. Much of it is gone, and some of what remains has quietly stopped mattering. So this starts by helping you get the year back, one angle at a time, and asks what it meant only once there’s something in front of you to look at.

And it doesn’t ask what you learned. Looking back has been worth more to me for showing the distance covered than for any lesson I could name.

You don’t have to do it in December, or on the thirty-first of anything. Any twelve months will do.

You can read every prompt here and write on screen, or print the PDF and fill it in by hand. The questions are the same either way.

What's inside

  1. Getting the year back

    The hard part of looking back is never the thinking — it is that by the time you sit down, you no longer have the year with you. The four lists across these first two pages are deliberately easy, and they exist to hand it back to you before anything else is asked.

    2 short lists

    • Places I went
    • People who kept appearing in my year

  2. Getting the year back, part two

    Two more lists, about what you did rather than where you were. First times and changes of routine are the two angles that recover the most year for the least effort.

    2 short lists

    • Things I did for the first time
    • Things that changed in my week

  3. The year at a glance

    Now that the year is on the page, it can be named. Doing this first — as most reviews ask you to — is why so many of them get abandoned on page two.

    1 prompt · 1 short list

    • Three words for this year
    • If this year had a title, what would it be?

  4. Moments

    Three is enough. The point is not to catalogue the year but to say why these three survived it.

    1 prompt

    • Three moments I want to remember — and why these three stayed with me

  5. People

    Years are usually remembered through people rather than events, and the second question tends to produce more than the first.

    3 prompts

    • Who mattered to me this year?
    • A conversation I still remember
    • Someone I understood differently

  6. Change

    Three questions about what moved, and a fourth about what quietly stopped mattering. That things fall away on their own is information about the year too.

    4 prompts

    • Something I started
    • Something I stopped
    • Something that changed unexpectedly
    • Something that felt urgent and no longer matters

  7. Difficulty, and distance

    From inside your current life, what you got through looks smaller than it was. The third question exists to undo that flattening — it is usually the one people find they have most to say about.

    4 prompts

    • Something that was difficult
    • What did I actually do when it was difficult?
    • What feels ordinary now that would have seemed impossible a year ago?
    • Something I changed my mind about

  8. Small things

    The list nothing else would preserve. No summary, no photograph and no calendar keeps these.

    1 short list

    • Small things I don't want to forget

  9. Looking forward

    Three questions instead of resolutions. What you carry and what you put down matter more than a list of targets.

    3 prompts

    • What do I want to carry with me?
    • What do I want to leave behind?
    • What deserves more of my attention?

  10. Both halves

    A year has a private half and a shared one. Closing with both is what stops this being only an account of yourself.

    2 prompts

    • What did I do that I'm proud of?
    • What did I contribute to other people's lives this year?

Print it

The full template as a clean PDF, laid out for writing by hand.

Download the PDF

Free. No email required.

What to do with these pages

  • Write the year on the front and keep these pages with last year's.
  • Read them again before you start the next one — that is when a review stops being an exercise and becomes a record.

Keep the story going

Deeditt is a place to document the experiences, changes and moments that matter to you — privately, and publicly only when you decide.

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