At the end of any year, life slows down for many and gives them the opportunity to pause and reflect on the year that has gone. With that comes a lot of content on the process one should go through to effectively use this time. Vision boards. Misogi’s. Kevin’s rule. Daily systems and anti goals. Objectives and key results. The list goes on.
While some people are eager to reflect at the end of the year, this list of frameworks created a sense of pressure that I had to find the perfect way of approaching this reflection. Pushed by this pressure, I experimented with different strategies, none of which really sticking and becoming a consistent practice I could rely on at the end of every year.
What did I find challenging? Simply put- a year is a long period of time and a lot can happen in 12 months. Whatever I tried, I struggled to find a way to reflect on the year in a way that truly encapsulated everything that happened (internally and externally). Hence, I would always feel like I was not giving the reflection process justice.
Despite this struggle, I accept that the end of a year is a natural time to pause, so finding SOMETHING that worked for me was still important. At the end of 2025, I tried experimenting with yet another strategy and I think I found that something.
Disclaimer: what is far more important than any one framework, including what I share below, is the intention behind it. This kind of content should only act as inspiration for what you can experiment with as you find what works for you. Copy all of it. Ignore all of it. Try integrating one or two things into something that you know suits your way of thinking. It is up to you.
Step 1: Take stock of what happened in the year
I do not have an impeccable long term memory (perhaps like many of you) and so, naturally, there are things that happened in the year that I had forgotten. A way of reminding yourself that I found effective was going through my phone’s camera roll. My camera roll did not capture every single moment in the year (I, admittedly, do not take many photos) but seeing certain images triggered my memory of other things that had happened. With this reminder, I made a list of stuff- big or small- that happened in the year. Events. Specific moments. Milestones. Anything really. Seeing this list, once written out fully, acted as food for thought for what followed.
Step 2: Identifying what the year had taught me
Being a reflective person who makes an effort to tune in to what I am thinking, it was important for me to understand my recurring/evolving thought patterns and how these could guide me as I stepped into the new year. My aim was to create a list of lessons and perspectives that I could say shaped my 2025.
Based on more recent events and reflections, there were a few things that immediately stood out and made the list. However, understanding how your emotions and thoughts have evolved of the course of a year is quite a challenge when you spend so much time focusing on the here and now.
To get a better sense of this evolution, I relied on my journal notes- journalling being a habit I got back into in 2025 after years of being on and off with it. I admit that “journalling” is a bit of a buzzword nowadays and means different things for different people. For me, it involved making a note of random things that I was thinking about in the week and then exploring these thoughts a bit deeper at the end of the week. While I was not perfectly consistent with this practice, I was left with notes on my phone from most weeks in the year with random words, phrases and sentences that captured my thoughts. They were neither structured or neat, but probably an accurate representation of what went through my head over the year.
Using these notes, I asked ChatGPT to analyse what my thoughts, extracting significant lessons and assessing how my perspective on things had changed overtime. I took this month by month, further asking it to give me a year summary at the end of the 12 months.
ChatGPT? For reflecting? Using AI for something so human? Before you think I have trapped myself in the AI bubble, I know that tools like ChatGPT are not perfect for these kinds of tasks. There were a few cases where it did not quite understand what some notes were getting at (particularly in months where notes were more sparse and less detailed). What ChatGPT did provide me with, however, was an outside perspective on my thinking (albeit quite objective). Despite being skeptical at first, I was honestly quite surprised with how illuminating this exercise was for me. It painted a picture of what the conversation I have with myself looks like, exposing me to ways my thinking had changed over the year (some of which I had not realised).
(In hindsight, going through 12 months at once took me quite a while and took up a lot of brain power. In 2026, I hope to do a similar thing but for every month as the months go by- which might be a bit more manageable for both ChatGPT and myself).
Doing this gave me things to add and tweak in my list of lessons and perspectives, leaving me with a list of 7. And it was a list I was happy with, simply because I felt like it sufficiently captured all that happened in the year and gave me a lot to consider moving forward.
In previous years, I have seen many Instagram reels that say “Before the year ends, answer these 5 questions”. I have always accepted that they were good questions to answer but I never really knew how to answer them, stopping me from even trying. The process I went through meant that I was much better equipped to answer these questions fully and honestly. To me, that is a sign that I gave the end of year reflection process justice- for the first time after years of experimenting.