End of year journaling

The past several years I've spent a bit of time in that odd window between Christmas and New Year's Day doing some reflecting and journaling. For years I used the Year Compass prompts in my yearly Bullet Journal, but at some point I decided it wasn't quite capturing what I wanted.

Last year I came up with my own, simpler prompts, which look like this:

  1. Things that happened this year - going through photos, calendars, writing to pull out some key moments
  2. Things I'm proud of
  3. Things that gave me energy
  4. Things to leave behind in the year that passed
  5. Things to do more of in the year to come

Since I no longer have one notebook for the year (here's my current notebook system), I'm planning to try out writing on loose pages with the plan to bind them together as a little snapshot of my year. It's very satisfying to use up empty pages from my old notebooks! Since this DIY booklet will be bound after writing and not taken around with me, I don't have to worry so much about it being robust or easy to lay flat to work in. I've done a test run using a simple Japanese 4 hole book binding technique.

IMG_0663.jpeg|test run of binding a booklet

I've pretty much stopped New Years Resolutions or settings goals for the year - I find that I'm terrible at estimating what I can achieve in 12 months and guessing at what my priorities will look like so far from today. I'll just continue Optimise for curiousity, not productivity and see where the year takes me.