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Life review

Type of reviews⚑

Define the areas' objectives⚑

I've had a hard time choosing how must those objectives be defined. Should they be generic? or would it be better for them to be concrete and measurable?

Given the mindset of this review, it's better to have generic open goals. As you climb up the abstraction ladder and work with greater time slots you need to reduce the precision because you have more uncertainty. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow so adding hard SMART goals is unrealistic and a certain path to frustration.

They should be guidelines that help you define the direction of where do you want to go and leave to the lower abstraction level reviews particularize those principles into more specific goals.

  • Create a new review document with the next structure:

* Area objectives
** Area 1
- Put a timer of 20 mins and for each of the areas answer the next questions (remember to make it general and not project dependent): - What differences will the area have in three months?

  • Complete your gathered results by:
  • Reading the current area document objectives
  • Gather more objectives through skimming through the projects of the areas
  • Your gathered notes in think.org.
Review the previous trimester area tactics⚑
  • Review what are you doing in the area
  • Review what you should be doing

Trimester analyze⚑

Choose the trimester area tactics⚑

Trimester decide⚑

Order, prioritize and choose the area objectives⚑

Gather them in the roadmap document.

Semester reviews⚑

The objectives of the trimester review are:

  • Review the previous semester plan
  • Identify the goals/visions/principles to focus on for the semester
  • Identify the strategy you want to follow on those goals/visions/principles.
  • Identify the philosophical topics of your life to address

Year review⚑

Year reviews are meant to give you an idea of:

  • How much have you and your workflows evolved
  • What roadmap decisions were right, which ones were wrong
  • With the context you have now, you can think of how you could have avoided the bad decisions.

If you have the year's planning you can analyze it against your task management tools and life logs and create a review document analyzing all.

The process then has many phases:

Housekeeping⚑

As they are time expensive, probably lot of time may have passed since your last life review, it's a good time to do some housekeeping tasks to have a tidy environment (and data!) before you start analyzing everything.

  • Extract all your media (photos, videos, text) from all your devices (mobiles, laptops, servers) to your central archive. For the portable devices I use syncthing to sync all the important data to the NAS, although it's usually untidy.
  • Once it's extracted tidy them all. For example you could group the pictures and videos in a tree of directories (trips, trips/2022-06-Glasgow, trips/2022-06-Glasgow/2022-06-10-hiking-trail-lakes, ...). As this is an unpleasant task I've created claspy a command line tool that helps you categorize the files into their desired paths. Do the same for the documents, music, binaries... everything! until you have an empty mobile and empty Downloads directory.
  • Update your ledger so that it reflects the reality.
  • Update your task manager systems so that it reflects the latest state.
  • Update your digital garden so that you don't have any uncommited changes.

Analysis⚑

To do it I gather all the information from my life logging sources and start thinking of what do I want to change. It helps me to write a markdown document with the insights gathered in this process.

What you have learned⚑

It's always interesting to look back and see what you've learned throughout the year. I have these sources of data:

Digital garden⚑

If you happen to have a digital garden you can look at your git history to know what has changed since the last year. That's cumbersome and ugly though, it's better to review your newsletters, although you may need to use something like mkdocs-newsletter.

While you skim through the newsletters you can add to the analysis report the highlights of what you've learned.

You can also check your repository insights.

Anki⚑

I use anki to record the knowledge that I need to have in my mind. The program has a "Stats" tab where you can see your insights of the last years to understand how are you learning. You can also go to the "Browse" tab to sort the cards by created and get an idea of which ones have been the most used decks.

What you've read⚑

Each time I finish a book I register it in a document with a rating and optionally a review. When doing the review I check which ones I read, which ones I liked more, what genres have been the most popular for me, which authors. With these data I create an analysis of what seems promising to read in the future.

I also update the section of "what you've learnt" with the insights of these books.

Task review⚑

Follow the review process of the task management article.

Planning⚑

What to read⚑

With the analysis of what I've read I research for new books and create an ordered list per genre.