I've never been one for New Year's Resolutions. What I have started doing is some personal retrospectives. I tend to do them more than just at the end of the year, but the end of the year is the most formal (I capture it in my journal). I found retrospectives to be a good way for me to see changes that are not always obvious in day-to-day life. I've also found it to be a good way to avoid the feeling of "man I didn't do anything last year."

How Does It Work?

Three years ago, I created a journal entry for a review of 2011 and some outlook for 2012. In the review, I listed what I thought went well during the year and what I could have done better. For the outlook, I took some of the do better items and crafted something like a goal statement around them. I also took some of my aspirations and put those on there as well. There are two high level guidelines I try to follow for writing the outlook.

1. I don't make it a todo list. If items are too specific they don't carry appropriate meaning. I also track todo stuff elsewhere.
2. I don't make items too generic or simple. I try to write a simple sentence of what I want to happen and some context around why. I want to give myself enough context so that when I review it I'll understand why I included this item.

I try to review the list once a quarter. Last year I reviewed it around some time off in the spring, summer and at thanksgiving. I add and remove things when appropriate. I don't treat it as a set-in-stone contract.

Why Do It?

A few of my colleagues use a less formal approach when we talk about monitoring change. Some of my friends will say things like "Five years ago we no development teams and everyone was working on their own. Now we have multiple development teams contributing to the same code base of one project." When you look at it on that scale, things are going in the right direction. I often find, the world doesn't change fast enough for me and I don't see those changes as readily. Sometimes, my perceived lack of progress makes me cynical about whether or not we will reach our goals. I'm seeing that doing some retrospective thinking is helping me see incremental progress more clearly. Sometimes seeing that forest through the trees is hard. Little retrospectives seem to be helping.