I’ve Done Tim Ferriss’s Past Year Review for 5 Years. Here Are 22 Lessons I Learned
It’s often said that wisdom comes with experience. But I’ve found that in order to learn from your life experiences, you need to reflect on them.
By now, most people who are into self-improvement or personal growth have heard of Past Year Reviews. As far as I can tell, they were first introduced by Tim Ferriss in a blog post or podcast from about 2017 that I can no longer find (since replaced by this one).
Tim initially framed the PYR as an alternative to often-ineffective New Year’s resolutions. Since then, the idea has spread, with more and more people doing annual reviews and creating their own techniques and formats.
If you’ve never done a PYR before, here’s a quick recap of the format that Tim Ferriss recommends:
On paper or in your note taking software of choice, create two columns: “positive” and “negative.”
Go through your calendar and/or journal for the past year, week by week.
For each week, note the people, activities, and commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month, and put them in their respective columns.
Once you’ve gone through the whole year, look at your two columns and do an 80/20 analysis. What 20% of each column produced the most powerful or reliable emotional peaks — positive or negative?
Take the most powerful positives and schedule more of them for your next year. That means putting them on your calendar, booking tickets, making plans with people, and prepaying for activities. As Tim says, “It’s not real until it’s in the calendar.” Then take your most powerful negatives and put them on a “Not To Do” list somewhere where you can see them for the first few weeks of the year.
I wrote more about this process in my recent article, Tim Ferriss’s Most Neglected (But Powerful) Advice.
I’ve done a Past Year Review every December for the last 5 years, since Tim initially shared the practice. I’ve found it extremely helpful, leading me to stop behaviors and end relationships that had a negative impact on me, and to take some bold leaps in my life, including spending three months in India and Nepal in 2018, quitting three different jobs, and starting my own business.
This past week, I took this process a step further by putting my top 20% positive and negative items from the past five years into a table in Notion so that I could compare, contrast, and draw conclusions from the data.
Here’s what I learned:
Learning
Online courses can be amazing or underwhelming, but taking more than one at a time is a recipe for failure.
In-person courses, trainings, and conferences consistently engage me and end up being positive, intellectually and socially stimulating experiences.
Travel
When I was younger, I used to take long (3+ month) trips by myself. But I now realize that traveling alone and having too much free time by myself often leaves me feeling bored and depressed.
On the other hand, traveling to visit friends or family members, or taking trips with friends, consistently creates some of my most positive experiences.
Creativity
Creative activities like writing, performing at poetry readings, and DMing give me a lot of energy, much more energy than they take.
Appreciating good books (especially poetry and fiction), music, and films is the spice of life for me. The last two years I’ve especially enjoyed reading more sci-fi and fantasy (top recommendations from 2022: This Is How You Lose The Time War and Gideon The Ninth).
Seeing movies in the theater (especially with friends) was surprisingly consistent at generating memorable and enjoyable experiences (worth seeing in theater: Dune).
Work & Career
Staying in a job that requires you to work overtime on evenings and weekends to keep up will only lead to resentment and burnout.
Running your own business can be hard work. But in my experience, it’s been less stressful and more satisfying than working for someone else.
The “Not To Do list” portion of the yearly review is really important–don’t sleep on it. I ended up doing several of the things on my not to do list for 2020 within the first two months of the year, with predictable consequences. Example? Accepting a job that required me to commute an hour both ways. Which leads me to…
Long commutes suck. Don’t live more than 15 minutes from work if you can help it. If you have no choice, use podcasts and audiobooks to make the most of the time, but strongly consider either moving, changing jobs, or going remote.
Always take the week of Christmas off work to spend time with family. If I have to work through the holiday, I’ll regret it. Because I already knew this from a PYR, I turned down a job in 2019 because they would have required me to work through Christmas.
Having too much free time is just as bad as being busy and stressed out. All that time tends to get filled with low-quality activities like internet browsing, binge-watching, and overthinking.
If you don’t know what to do next with your life or career, just pick something and go for it. It’s better to try something and fail than to sit around doing nothing and overthinking it. We don’t figure these things out by thinking or even journaling, but by trying things and finding out what works.
Relationships
Relationships with close friends and family are one of the most important things in my life, with a handful of people responsible for 80% or more of all my positive emotions and experiences. I need to schedule more trips, activities, and even Zoom calls with these people.
Spending time with my daughter is one of the most meaningful things in my life. Even seemingly mundane things like attending her parent-teacher conferences have been surprisingly impactful.
If you’re a man, don’t date women who are unavailable. As David Deida put it, “choose a woman who chooses you.”
Your romantic partner may have the single greatest positive or negative impact on your emotional wellbeing, so choose wisely. As Naval Ravikant wrote, "Find a relationship where you, naturally being you, makes the other person happy. And the other person, naturally being the other person, makes you happy."
Mental Health
In the morning, I need to get out of the house, get sunlight and fresh air, and interact with people. This is why I love going to coffee shops in the morning–it’s not just the caffeine that’s a major mood booster.
My last depressive episode was in fall 2019. I went to therapy, meditated, and took supplements. But of all the things I did that helped, lifting weights seems to have made the biggest difference, with the deadlift having the greatest impact on my mood and energy levels of any single exercise.
Meditation has had a major impact on my wellbeing, but it wasn’t long retreats that made the biggest difference. It was shorter, more frequent meditations and practice in daily life.
Of all the things that contributed most to my negative emotions and experiences in the last three years, Covid-19 didn’t even make the list. Why? The pandemic was outside my control, so I accepted it. The things that made me suffer were the things I didn’t accept.
These lessons are notes to self, reflecting my individual experiences. Your mileage may vary, but I also wouldn’t share these unless I thought they might help someone reading this.
Which of the lessons from my list stood out to you? What have you learned from your own Past Year Reviews? Let me know on Twitter.
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