Yearly review

By Tiffany Young

The Art of Non-conformity has a great post on how to do a yearly review, which looks back at the past year to see what you've accomplished, as well as look forward to what you'd like to do in the new year. If you are a GTDer, this follows David Allen's Getting Things Done system. There is even an Excel spreadsheet for you to fill out your personal goals for 2011, with flexibility to add your own categories.

I'm filling it out myself and one of the things I'd like to develop in the New Year is to be more grateful. I see this happening by keeping an ongoing list of things I'm grateful for. Part of the reason I began this blog was to get rid of the things that don't add anything to my life, hoping hat the things I decided to keep would be things that I truly loved and enjoyed—things to be grateful for.

Here are a few things I'm grateful for from 2010:

1. I'm relatively healthy.
2. I have a decent paying job where I can use my creativity and many people in Central Texas read my work each month.
3. I have a nice camera, which I bought this year.
4. My family has always been there for me when I needed them and I'm thankful for the time I spent with them in Italy.
5. I'm thankful for having the needed resources to take a trip abroad for the first time in my life.
6. I'm thankful for my friends, who put up with me, even though I can be grouchy at times.
7. I'm thankful for the small space I've been renting from a friend for the past year, which is very inexpensive for Austin.
8. I'm thankful for extended family.
9. I'm thankful for having clothes to keep me warm and food to sustain me.
10. I'm thankful for my parent's dog, Coco, who shows us how to love people unconditionally.
11. I'm thankful for the library, which allows me to read good books and watch good movies endlessly.
    

There are plenty of other things to be grateful and I hope I'm able to remember that in the new year. I'm looking forward to 2011 and hope that I can make all of my goals. I want my list this year to be more than New Year's resolutions. I want them to be blueprints for my life.