🧑 Year in Reviews 101

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Hey there! Welcome back to The Flow by Flocus. If you’re new around here, welcome! 👋  You can catch up on our previous editions right here.

This week: It’s all about the year in review: the good, the bad, and the stressful. Assessing how well your year-in-review is working for you, why the process of reviewing can feel so hard, and creative review alternatives to try in 2025 and beyond. Let’s get into it!

🤓 Let’s Review

Do you take time each December to reflect on how the year went?

If so, what does that process look like for you?

Do you break out all the fancy pens, notebooks, and planners? Got a refined digital journaling setup? Prefer to just run through things in your head?

However you approach it, riddle us this: how well is your year-in-review working for you?

If your answer is anything along the lines of, “It doesn’t spark joy,” this one’s for you.

Now, we’re not trying to poke holes in your method — quite the opposite!

With that in mind, let’s explore why reviewing your year can feel more stressful than uplifting, plus some fun and creative alternatives you can try instead. Let’s dig in!

😪 Why the Year-in-Review Can Feel So Heavy

Even if your year wasn’t particularly eventful, 12 months is a big stretch of time to reflect on in one go. Breaking it down by month or season can help, but it’s still a lot to process even then.

Traditional year-in-review prompts can also hit harder than necessary: “Did my actions align with my values? Did I meet my goals? Where did I fall short? What can I do better next year?”

Sheesh — talk about a recipe for guilt, overwhelm, and self-loathing.

And sure, part of the point of reviewing your year is to discover what worked, what didn’t, and identify new ways to keep growing.

But if reaching these conclusions and planning these major overhauls only causes you to feel crummy about yourself, how helpful are they, really?

If you want to head into the new year feeling calm, capable, and empowered, add some softness, creativity, and joy to your review. Let’s take a look at how to do it.

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Now, here’s how to put together your year-end review!

⚡️ How to Make Your EOY Review Work Better for You

🤏 Keep it minimal, creative, and fun

If writing pages of journal entries doesn’t sound like your idea of a joyful afternoon, try a simplified alternative:

• 🥇 Summarize your year in 1 word, phrase, or line

• 🌈 Pick a color or emoji to represent the year

• 🎤 Add some pop culture — your year in albums, films, song titles, TV shows, etc.

• 🪡 Ditch the journal and turn your “review” into a craft project (weather quilt, freestyle painting, collage art)

• 👯 Ask a friend to review your year for you! “Interview” them about your own “greatest hits” (you might be surprised at what you learn)

🥗 Add texture to your logs and trackers

One of our biggest pet peeves with habit trackers and similar life logs: they give you tons of data, but rarely much substance.

Pure data is great for certain things, like health, where you need big-picture stats to understand how things are developing over time. But it’s not ideal for everything.

You could have a perfectly optimized habit log, but if it lacks texture on how you actually spent your days, how you felt, and what you learned — what are you getting out of it?

We’ll talk more about data, texture, and habit-tracking in an upcoming send, so keep your eyes peeled 👀

➗ Divide it up, and review as you go

Instead of waiting until December to dump 12 months of memories into a journal, create your year-in-review earlier and add to it as things happen.

This is the approach we’ve used for the last couple of years. We also divide our review into the major areas of life, including work, home, and relationships.

For each life area, we list out the highlights from a month or season. And we also include a “free space” for anything that doesn’t neatly fit into one category.

By the time we’re finished, it looks a little something like this (and yes, this is the author’s real year in review! Done digitally in Notion):

This method takes minutes, not hours. It focuses on the highlights (including the “small” stuff), but also touches on some of the big “negatives” that impacted our year.

From here, we dive into our paper journals to work through things that need more space, attention, or texture. That includes both the wins and the losses, which neatly introduces our last 2 tips.

🌟 Focus on the wins and highlights

Even if your year was mostly rough, we’re willing to bet there were some good moments and silver linings, too.

Lean into your wins, however small they may seem. This is the stuff that gets you through the bad days, months, and seasons. How can you sprinkle more of them into the upcoming year?

Oh, and not everything needs a big takeaway or life lesson attached. It’s okay to note a win, dwell in the pride of achieving it for a bit, then move on.

Of course, this is your year in review, so if you feel called to explore less “positive” memories or experiences in depth, do your thing — which leads us to the next tip.

🪁 Address what you need to, and let go of the rest

Reflecting on painful memories, big losses, and unmet goals is hard. These are the “metal” items weighing down your juggling act of life — slowing you down and making you “drop” other things.

You don’t need to address every single “negative” thing that happened this year. In fact, you probably don’t need to address most of it.

And when we say “address”, we don’t mean leaving it out of your review altogether. Include whatever feels right to you. Just try not to fixate on the small missteps — and avoid the temptation to cover every single negative that happened this year for the sake of a “complete” review.

To discover what really needs your attention, ask yourself: “Will this impact me going into the next year?” If not, it’s okay to set it down or let it go altogether. You can pick it back up again anytime you need to.

🪅 Flocus Picks

A curated list of things worth sharing.

• year in review with me: painting edition (Video) — If the idea of doing something creative interests you, check out this example from Riah Paige, who ranks all the diamond paintings she created in 2024 in this video

• Review My Year: Templates, Tunes & Topics (Website) — Need some structure for your review? Check out this collection of review templates, playlists, and reflection questions

• Top Songs of 2025 (Playlist) — Press rewind on the year with this top 50 playlist of 2025’s hits

✨ Flocus: Your Personal Productivity Dashboard

A thoughtful year-in-review is easier when you’re in a calm, supportive space. Flocus gives you a cozy home base to slow down, reflect without pressure, and keep you company while you document what actually mattered this year.

Go to Flocus

Your year-in-review doesn’t have to be a “review” at all. Mix it up, get creative, and have fun with it!

What are your year-in-review plans? If you try any of these tips, let us know how it goes! We always love hearing from you. 🥰

Until next Sunday,

Flocus Team