How to do a Half-Yearly Review of Your Life
Reflect on the past six months and plan for the next six 🚀 Attend my FREE Half-Yearly Review Bootcamp and download the Half-Yearly Review Workbook.
The end of June is here, and with it, so is the end of half of 2021.
You might be familiar with Annual Reviews and might have performed one at the beginning of this year. You might have set yearly goals that you might be making progress on or realized that you had to modify some of them. But you don't have to wait until the end of the year to reflect on your progress and where you are with your goals for 2021.
A Half-Yearly Review helps you reflect on your year so far, review the direction in which your habits are taking you towards your annual goals, and modify them based on your learnings.
This mid-year review helps you pivot your approach if you're heading in the wrong way and gives you enough time to course-correct to make progress in achieving your goals by December.
If you'd like to perform a Half-Yearly Review to reflect on the past six months and plan for the next half of the year, attend my free Half-Yearly Review Bootcamp this July 1st! I've designed fun exercises for the two-hour session, and the entry is free.
Here's how to do a half-yearly review of your life:
1️⃣ Reflect
Please don't confuse a review with planning. Planning is forward-looking, but we first start with looking backward.
A constructive review (yearly, monthly, or semi-annual review) always starts with Reflection. We begin by taking an objective look at our year so far. What went right? What went wrong? What did you learn? What could you have avoided? This process helps you design better systems and make definitive progress, so please be brutally honest with yourself.
I like making a list of things I am grateful for— working on something I love, the pretty notebook I journal in every day, the books I am reading that are changing my life, the lessons I learned, etc. I make an exhaustive list of everything that has impacted me.
🙏🏼 Make a list of 50 things you are grateful for in the past six months.
2️⃣ Grow
The next step is to actively look at what changes you need to make in your life and modify your goals where required. Perhaps you started the year with a set of goals and planned to achieve those goals. What has worked? How much progress have you made on them?
Or maybe you're setting brand new goals for yourself for the next few months. Why are these goals important for you? What stands in your way of achieving them?
Setting goals is an art but one that can be learned and gradually perfected. We're often hard on ourselves for not reaching certain milestones, but it might just be because we've set unrealistic goals for ourselves. Setting unrealistic goals is harmful because we tend to discard them entirely when we find ourselves not making enough meaningful progress on them. It is essential to set realistic goals and make sure not to overwhelm yourself.
🌱 Set tiny goals, make marginal improvements slowly, and grow slowly but surely.
So revisit your goals for the latter half of 2021: What specific areas do you wish to make changes in? What is the particular goal for these areas? Is it realistic, and can you observe yourself growing until the end of 2021?
I like doing a Visualization Exercise to think clearly about what an ideal day will look like in the next six months.
3️⃣ Plan
Now that you know where you'd like to be at the end of December, you can now design your life with a set of daily goals and habits.
If your health goal is to grow fitter, pencil in a 15-minute workout session every day before your morning coffee. If you're aiming at progressing in your career, set aside an hour of deliberate learning or reading a book from your field at least three times a week.
Your atomic habits compound, and at the end of this year, you will be what you do every single day from now. I use this Habit Scorecard to keep a track of my progress with habits: Click here to download it for free.
📈 Start small, review frequently, and improve marginally but consistently.
The first half of the year might be done, but you have an entire six-month period that's waiting to be seized. It doesn't matter if the past six months have been far from ideal. July offers a second chance to get back to things you've given up on and try for small but consistent gains in habits towards a better you.
This week, my notion template is a Half Yearly Review Workbook. If you wish to download this template, attend my Half Yearly Review Bootcamp on July 1st to grab a free copy! There are many fun exercises in the two-hour session, and the entry is free.
✨Click here to register for the Half-Yearly Review Bootcamp (Entry is free)✨
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