The merits of a year-end personal audit: Life Hacks by Charles Assisi
Recency bias can make it easy to lose sight of small achievements, new passions and little victories. But they all build up to bigger change.
It’s that time of year when I conduct a personal annual review.
This isn’t a one-day exercise but an elaborate one that takes about a week to complete. I aim to go about it in a detached way, and I start by going over the notes in my daily journals. I’ve been an Evernote junkie for a long time. Friends tell me Notion is a better piece of software, and I may migrate to that. But I digress…
I always begin the review exercise feeling a bit intimidated. This is, after all, like embarking on an archaeological dig on the self. Each entry is the journal is a memory. The daily narrative brings me face-to-face with moments of triumph, instances of despair and elements of the mundane that I had forgotten.
The review, much like Mumbai’s local trains, is crowded; with details, emotions and thoughts. It insists on a patience of the kind I reserve for the traffic jams on the city’s Western Express Highway during rush hour.
But this is no quick commute. The aim is to complete a slow, committed trudge through the year’s experiences without losing one’s head. The point of it all is to observe myself, and sometimes be a judge in the courtroom of my life.
On this introspective pilgrimage, the biggest enemy I encounter is recency bias. This is the phenomenon in which people assign disproportionate importance to recent events over older ones, in ways that affect how they make decisions and assess progress.
This bias creeps in because the freshest information in our memory is often considered the most vital. For prehistoric humans, this worked — the sound of a predator stepping on a twig was far more important than the memory of a berry that had made one ill a week earlier. But amid the complexity of the modern world, this approach to information can lead us to overlook data or experiences that might be most relevant and telling.
To place this in immediate perspective, I have been beating myself up over the weight I have gained, and worrying about how intense exercise doesn’t appear to be yielding any results. While this is disappointing, it is at times like this that the personal annual review helps place things in perspective.
Having come fairly far on this year’s audit trail, I can acknowledge that my current weight is not the whole picture. Through the year, I invested time in my health, with things like long walks and bicycle rides, declining to stay up beyond certain hours, and watching what I ate. This sounds mundane, but the journal has it that this took effort. I guess I’d made up my mind to begin work on sculpting a better version of myself. And now, in the quiet, as I pore over the timelines, I can force myself to look beyond the recency bias. And I can see that there is much to celebrate.
Big change takes time, and the series of small victories that leads up to it often goes unacknowledged. In this respect, the daily notes are not just scribbles, but a trove of forgotten victories and aspirations. As this annual review brings them to the forefront, it reveals patterns and passions silently brewing beneath the surface. Such as my deep fascination with the biosciences; the hyperlinks in my notes point to just how much time I have invested in reading up on evolutions in the field. The notes show how my passion for the subject has endured, all these decades since I last studied it formally, in college.
This leads me down a path of reminiscing. I liken it to the Indian practice of swadhyaya or self-study, an introspective lens through which one views the contents of one’s life.
As I look back, I draw from other philosophical wells. The Stoic practice of reflecting on one’s mortality and the transient nature of things helps me detach from the clutches of material success. I cannot think of anything else that explains my fascination with software programs such as FaceLab and FaceApp, which generate images of me and my loved ones, as we might age. Many find this scary. I like to think of it as a reality check.
On flipping through the notes, I also chuckle at the naiveté of some of my early-year resolutions. How I solemnly vowed to master the art of making biryani, for instance; an ambition that remains unfulfilled. I won’t be adding it to next year’s list. Some things, one must eventually let go of.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder at Founding Fuel & co-author of The Aadhaar Effect)
It’s that time of year when I conduct a personal annual review.
This isn’t a one-day exercise but an elaborate one that takes about a week to complete. I aim to go about it in a detached way, and I start by going over the notes in my daily journals. I’ve been an Evernote junkie for a long time. Friends tell me Notion is a better piece of software, and I may migrate to that. But I digress…
I always begin the review exercise feeling a bit intimidated. This is, after all, like embarking on an archaeological dig on the self. Each entry is the journal is a memory. The daily narrative brings me face-to-face with moments of triumph, instances of despair and elements of the mundane that I had forgotten.
The review, much like Mumbai’s local trains, is crowded; with details, emotions and thoughts. It insists on a patience of the kind I reserve for the traffic jams on the city’s Western Express Highway during rush hour.
But this is no quick commute. The aim is to complete a slow, committed trudge through the year’s experiences without losing one’s head. The point of it all is to observe myself, and sometimes be a judge in the courtroom of my life.
On this introspective pilgrimage, the biggest enemy I encounter is recency bias. This is the phenomenon in which people assign disproportionate importance to recent events over older ones, in ways that affect how they make decisions and assess progress.
This bias creeps in because the freshest information in our memory is often considered the most vital. For prehistoric humans, this worked — the sound of a predator stepping on a twig was far more important than the memory of a berry that had made one ill a week earlier. But amid the complexity of the modern world, this approach to information can lead us to overlook data or experiences that might be most relevant and telling.
To place this in immediate perspective, I have been beating myself up over the weight I have gained, and worrying about how intense exercise doesn’t appear to be yielding any results. While this is disappointing, it is at times like this that the personal annual review helps place things in perspective.
Having come fairly far on this year’s audit trail, I can acknowledge that my current weight is not the whole picture. Through the year, I invested time in my health, with things like long walks and bicycle rides, declining to stay up beyond certain hours, and watching what I ate. This sounds mundane, but the journal has it that this took effort. I guess I’d made up my mind to begin work on sculpting a better version of myself. And now, in the quiet, as I pore over the timelines, I can force myself to look beyond the recency bias. And I can see that there is much to celebrate.
Big change takes time, and the series of small victories that leads up to it often goes unacknowledged. In this respect, the daily notes are not just scribbles, but a trove of forgotten victories and aspirations. As this annual review brings them to the forefront, it reveals patterns and passions silently brewing beneath the surface. Such as my deep fascination with the biosciences; the hyperlinks in my notes point to just how much time I have invested in reading up on evolutions in the field. The notes show how my passion for the subject has endured, all these decades since I last studied it formally, in college.
This leads me down a path of reminiscing. I liken it to the Indian practice of swadhyaya or self-study, an introspective lens through which one views the contents of one’s life.
As I look back, I draw from other philosophical wells. The Stoic practice of reflecting on one’s mortality and the transient nature of things helps me detach from the clutches of material success. I cannot think of anything else that explains my fascination with software programs such as FaceLab and FaceApp, which generate images of me and my loved ones, as we might age. Many find this scary. I like to think of it as a reality check.
On flipping through the notes, I also chuckle at the naiveté of some of my early-year resolutions. How I solemnly vowed to master the art of making biryani, for instance; an ambition that remains unfulfilled. I won’t be adding it to next year’s list. Some things, one must eventually let go of.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder at Founding Fuel & co-author of The Aadhaar Effect)
All Access.
One Subscription.
Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines
to 100 year archives.
Archives
HT App & Website
