Can you believe it’s almost the end of the year already? If you’re anything like me, your end of year is always this mad rush to get things done before the shutdown period. But even though it’s hectic, I love the end of the year because it’s such a great time to take a deep breath and reflect on how it all went.

This year, I’ve prepared a free reflection template for you to process 2024 and start your next work year with a bang! Today’s post is our last for the year, so let me walk you through how to use this template.

Before we jump into planning for next year, it’s important to spend some time thinking about how this year went – so that’s why it’s first up!

The template here is in Mad Libs style. For those of you who never played Mad Libs, it’s basically a fill-in-the-blank game, and I love it for reflections because it can really help you to get unstuck by thinking in prose rather than bullet points. I’ve written some sentences to prompt you to think about your big accomplishments, tough challenges, and your career progress this year.

Next up, we have a broader retrospective – or retro, as we often shorten them to! This is a simple framework I love to do at the end of the year: Start, Stop, More of, Less of.

To use the template, simply bullet point your thoughts in the relevant sections. (You can set a timer and some music if you need a bit of a deadline to get through it!) When you’ve written down all of your thoughts, go back and bold 3 ideas per section.

Why 3 in each section? Because more than that is too hard to commit to – and because we want balance. Most times I run these kinds of exercises (even when I’m just on my own), the “Start” and “More of” sections are way longer than the other two. You can’t just keep adding without also culling, so be conscious of not overloading yourself.

Now that we have our priorities, we can move onto planning for action! There are four templates to match each kind of priority, and you can just fill in the blanks (like our first exercise) to craft the start of your plan.

Now, since I don’t know what kinds of goals you’re going to come up with 👀, these might not suit every goal! But they should give you a good starting point, and I recommend them for goals that are big enough that they might need stakeholder buy-in.

Don’t forget to grab the template! It’s totally free – and I already have your email address, so I’m not even going to ask for that 😉 You’ll just need a (free) Notion account to use it. And here’s a quick guide on how to duplicate it to your own workspace.

That’s it for 2024! I’m going to take a break for a couple of weeks, but I’ll be back in your inboxes on January 8th 💖 If you’re taking a break this end-of-year, I hope you find it rejuvenating!