#559: Forget New Year’s Resolutions and Conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ Instead

Tim Ferriss (0:08)

Now is the appropriate time.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job usually to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. This, however, is a special and short episode, and it's going to detail how I approach New Year's resolutions. The truth of the matter is that I no longer really approach them at all, even though I did for decades.

Why the change? I have found that something I call past year reviews, or PYR, to be more informed, valuable and actionable than half blindly looking forward with broad resolutions for the next year. I did my first PYR after a mentor's young daughter died of cancer on December 31st, roughly 10 years ago. I remember the night very, very clearly. I got the news at a party and went to sit down by myself, and I sat with a notepad and by myself did my first past year review. I've done it every year since. Her passing was a very abrupt surprise. It was a somber reminder that our days here are too precious, also not guaranteed by the way. They are too precious not to fill them with the people and activities that nourish us most. So that's the goal of doing this review. It doesn't take very long. Completing a past year review takes just 30 to 60 minutes, and it looks something like this.

Step number one, grab a notepad and create two columns on a piece of paper, positive and negative. Just a line right down the middle, positive on one side, negative on the other. Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week. I do this in iCal or Google Calendar. It's pretty easy to do. So go through every week starting in January from the last year. For each week, jot down on the notepad on that piece of paper any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month, let's just say. I mean, it could be for the week, but broadly speaking, the month. This is not an exact science here. Put those things in their respective columns. So something that really, really bothered you, say sort of nine out of 10 bothered you or eight out of 10 bothered you, put that in the negative. Eight out of 10 positive, nine out of 10, or 10 out of 10 positive, put that in the positive.

Number four, step number four. Once you've gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, what 20% of each column produce the most reliable or powerful peaks? So you're doing an 80-20 analysis then of each of these columns that you'll have, positive and negative, to try to identify what is really producing disproportionately the most benefits and the most stress or negativity or, well, let's just call it challenging emotions, perhaps, if you wanna put it that way. Then step five, based on the answers, again, the question that we just answered is, what 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks? And step five, based on the answers, take your positive leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. You gotta get them on the calendar now. That's my experience. Book things with friends, prepay for activities, events, commitments that you know work for you. Exercise, whether it's rock climbing, who knows? Get more of it in the calendar committed to. It's not real, in my experience, until it's scheduled. That's step number one. Step number two is to take your negative leaders and create a not to do list.

At the top, right, so circle those things. Put them somewhere that you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2022 in this case. Although it certainly can be used for any year.

These are the people and things you know make you miserable or unhappy or stressed out. So don't put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO or other nonsense. These are the things to avoid. And that's it.

That is it. If you try it, please let me know how it goes.

And just a reminder, it's not enough to simply remove the negative. That creates a void. And the void will be filled by all sorts of noise.

And other people will decide your schedule for you. So get the positive things on the calendar ASAP, lest they get crowded out by all the BS, all of the other kind of cool but not amazing things that will crop up and otherwise fill your days. So you got to decide your schedule in advance, be proactive, or it will be decided for you. And if you want to see the instructions in written form for the past year review, just go to tim.blogslashpyr. That's tim.blogslashpyr.