Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPSnacks: Conducting a Yearly Review - Retrospective, Reset and Refocus with Hala and Shiv | Human Behavior

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝘆 is just around the corner, and we encourage you to go beyond a New Year’s Resolution this year! Our latest guest, Daniel Pink, taught us that January 1st is a 🌟 𝗧𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸 🌟 you can use as a turning point for new beginnings in episode #50. 🙇🏻‍♀️ In fact, it’s scientifically proven that you’re more likely to stick to new habits you start on temporal landmark days like the first of the year or month, or social temporal landmark days like your birthday. Since the ultimate temporal landmark is coming up, now is the perfect time to get ready and conduct a yearly review. We like to conduct our yearly reviews in 3 parts: Retrospective, Reset and Refocus Tune in learn about this framework and get inspired to conduct a yearly review. Happy New Year!!!!!

Hey everyone, you're listening to Yap Snacks, a new series of bite-sized pods hosted by the Yap team. Today, I'm here with my amazing producership Dutt, and in anticipation of New Year's Day, we're covering how to conduct a yearly review. First, let's talk about the importance of New Year's Day. In our most recent episode, number 50, I spoke with Daniel Pink, who is the author of When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. And during our conversation, he introduced me to this concept of temporal landmarks. And now these days are incredibly effective to use to construct new beginnings or to have a fresh start.

The first day of the year is what social scientists call a temporal landmark. So just like we use physical landmarks to navigate space, for example, when you're giving directions, you might say turn left at the Exxon station to get to my house. We also use landmarks to navigate time. And these landmarks stand out from the sea of other days, and their prominence makes them really memorable for us. And there's actually scientific proof that backs up this fresh start. effect. And in 2014, three scholars from Morton published a breakthrough study that broadened

our understanding of temporal landmarks. They analyzed eight years of Google searches and discovered that searches for the word diet spiked on January 1st, 80% more than a typical day. And while that might not be that surprising, the research also showed that the first of every calendar cycle also had a spike in the search for diet. So like the first of the month, the first day of the week. and something about these first days switched on people's motivation. So temporal landmarks really offer us a chance to start again. They give us the confidence to be our new selves. They enable us to behave better and motivate us to achieve our aspirations.

And they really break up the day to day and help us look at the big picture. They help us take time to slow down our thinking and make better decisions. Temporal landmarks are categorized in two main ways. So they can be social or they can be personal. New Year's Day, the first of the month, even Mondays are considered to be social temporal landmarks. And then there's personal temporal landmarks that are just unique to us, like our birthdays or anniversaries. And we can leverage these days in the same type of way.

So this year, let's think about New Year's day a little bit more intentionally now that we understand the psychological reasons that make this day so effective. And if you happen to not keep up with your plans after the New Year's, you can always use other temporal landmarks like the first of the month or your birthday to help you kickstart back up again. So in the spirit of temporal landmarks and the biggest one coming up being New Year's Day, we wanted to spend some time talking about the yearly review. Yearly review is a concept that was introduced to me by David Allen, who I interview on episode number five and number 21. And this is really going way beyond just a basic resolution. And I personally like to conduct my

yearly reviews and three parts. So first is a retrospective. Looking back on the past year, what went well, what didn't go well, did you hit your goals, how did you do financially, things like that. And then the second part is reset. So this is taking time to clean up, whether that's your inbox or the back of your car trunk. And then lastly, refocusing. So this is really about planning for the next year and thinking about your goals, whether they're big or small. So let's start digging deeper on the concept of retrospective, the first step in your yearly review. Shiv, what would you do during your retrospective? Absolutely, Hala.

We all have sticking points. We all have blocks. We all have things that pull us down. And so I think it's very important at the start of a new year to determine what's stopped you in the past. You know, you want to get honest with yourself about what got in the way. You want to learn from past experiences. Now, history doesn't necessarily always repeat, but it rhymes. And so problems that you've had in the past are likely going to rear their heads and so you down in the future.

And you have to build a game plan on how to deal with them. That's my view of retrospective. Very cool. And I personally think that you should just write everything down. Like, don't worry so much about the process. You can always organize your thoughts and categorize your thoughts later. Just write everything down. What were your most notable accomplishments?

What were your most notable events, points of interest from the last year? And like I mentioned before, it can be big or small. You can worry about the details later on. I was going to say it's great to have granular reviews, weekly reviews, potentially even daily reviews. And the yearly review is an amalgamation of them. It's a higher level, 1,000-foot view that combines all those small granular reviews. Yeah. So next stage in the yearly review would be reset.

So this is really about taking the time to clean up. What are your thoughts on that, Shiv? At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world.

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Just go to Indeed.com slash profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed, is all you need. So it's really good and important to start off the new year fresh. So clean out your desk, your calendar, your wardrobe, just throw away stuff you don't use.

Start the new year on a really good, positive note. Your home and your office should be conducive to getting good work done. You want to kind of hit the reset button. and get rid of all the baggage that's been holding you back in the past. You want to look good, you want to feel good, and then work good. Oh, I love that. It reminded me of Konmari. So that might be something really good to do.

Like you said, cleaning out your closet, only having the possessions that bring you joy. Also thinking about your relationships. And if any of your relationships need cleaning up, if you need to reach out to somebody you haven't spoke to in a while, that period between holidays and New Year's Day is such a time to catch up with the people that you love and that you want to make sure that you keep in touch with in the new year. Absolutely. And another point in the reset framework is to remember why you're making the resolutions that you make. You want to, you want to kind of reassess your goals, see where you are, see where your goals lie, see where you want to be, and then have a clear

sense of purpose and reason for doing what you're going to do in the coming year. And then lastly, the third stage is refocusing. So this is really about planning for the next year. Shiv, what are your thoughts on that? So many. There's so many tips that one can use. But one high-level thing I try and use is that all my goals should be smart. And smart is an acronym for they should be specific, they should be measurable, they should be achievable, they should be achievable, they should be relevant, and they should be time-bound. Let's talk a little more about some of these. It's very important to set specific, smaller, more granular goals.

It's very tempting to sometimes set lofty, big goals, but that's the easiest, way to both kill our motivation and kill our chances of success. So we want to, even if we have long-term big, lofty goals, we want to break them down into smaller pieces and set timeframes on those pieces. And realize that we might slip up from time to time. In fact, we will slip up from time to time, but not to let ourselves get beaten down when that happens and to just simply refocus and come back to working on our goals when we get off the wagon.

The goal should be relevant. You can't do everything. I think Ray Dalio once said that you can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want. And that's so true. Our time is limited. And so we want to make sure that whatever we're doing is most relevant to our most important goals. So it's really important that we don't get bogged down by minutia. And like Warren Buffett says, you know, the hardest thing about being a billionaire and being in a position like he is is having to say no to things.

He has to say no to about 99% of things that come his way. Even though they're all great opportunities, great people, he just can't be everywhere. We do want our goals to be achievable. It's very, very demotivating to set goals that can be achieved or that are sometimes dependent on external circumstances. So we want to break the goals down into tasks that are in our control. And finally, we do want the goals to be measurable. What gets measured, gets managed, was a famous quote by our management guru.

But in that vein, what gets measured gets tracked and gets achieved. And so we want to make sure that we're tracking our goals and our progress. And you see this in a lot of applications today, you know, language, learning applications, sleep, fitness tracking applications that measure our progress gives us that little kick, gamify the goal and make us more likely to achieve it. Yeah. I love that. I think it's really important to avoid vague or non-measurable goals.

For example, a goal like be happy or make more money. That's not a good goal. We all want to be happier. We all want to make more money. But we need it to be measurable and we need it to be specific. So a better goal would be, I want to make $200,000 this year. or I want to be happier by picking up a new hobby, which is golf. So just be very specific.

Another tip that I have for this refocusing part is to pick a theme for the year, have a one paragraph statement that kind of summarizes what you want your year to be, what is it going to look like, and who will you really be in the next year? So that's another key thing that I like to do each year. And so with these ideas, I think you guys have, a good baseline to conduct your yearly review. Remember that there's no right or wrong way to conduct a yearly review. And we just gave you a suggestion to use retrospective, reset, and refocus as your big markers

to kind of plan and organize during your yearly review. And before we bounce, there's one other last point I would want to touch on. And that's the concept of using other people in our goals. Now, I know I did say that we want to often make our goals set them up such that we can kind of be in control and we're not dependent on external circumstances and other people. But we can use other people very effectively. And one way we can use them is to make commitments. Sometimes when we make commitments to other people, we feel obliged, obligated to carry out on those commitments. And if it's just a commitment to ourselves, we're very often likely to fall off

the track and not follow through. So that's another way we can use people. And another way we can use our friends and families as support groups. We will fail, like, We'll get hard. There will be times where we're broken down. And we should kind of rely on other people to help support us, talk through our problems, use them for ideas. So our goals and our New Year's resolutions don't necessarily need to be lonely and devils. That's awesome advice, Shiv. I definitely think that using people as a way to stay accountable really can help us stick to our goals. So with that, we'll conclude our episode of Yap snacks. Remember, there's no right or wrong way to conduct a yearly review. We gave you three markers, which is retrospective, reset, and refocus,

which you can leverage while you're planning your year. We hope that you have a successful planning session and I wish you a happy new year. See you guys in 2020.