Write it down on paper

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an Experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] I have done an annual review for as long as I can remember. More than a decade for sure. I think I started sometime in my teen. And I never stopped. However, how I do my annual reviews has changed. Has evolved for the better. Definitely. And one of the things that I've always done though, is I do my annual review on paper.

[00:00:53] I don't do it on a computer. I don't do it on my iPad with the Apple pencil. I do it [00:01:00] in a lovely, fresh journal, or sometimes not fresh, but a great journal that I like with a great pen I enjoy writing with. There have been many studies on this, and my own experience tells me that they're true. The things that you write down are they, you just process them better.

[00:01:26] You remember them better, and I think you follow through on those things better. There's this concept of object permanence that I have learned about recently. They talk about it a lot in neurodivergent conversations, but I think we all have some semblance of object permanence, and I think that is why when people write things down, they perform better in school [00:02:00] at work and the things they write down they remember better because we all have that little object permanence.

[00:02:08] What we write down seems to stick in our brains just a little bit better. The act of doing it by hand has, it makes a difference. For a while I thought that if I just used the apple pencil on my iPad, it would have the same effect, and I think it does have a similar effect, but I found for me that being able to write it in a notebook or in a piece of paper, and then not only keep it there, but also like be able to refer to this notebook, this real tangible thing that is not digital in any way throughout the year makes a really big difference for how I do stuff.[00:03:00]

[00:03:00] Now, there has never been a year where I reached every single goal that I have, but I do better the years that I am more intentional and write things down a little bit more clearly. So my goal for this year is to do an annual review on paper and do it as thoroughly as I can, writing down everything from the retrospective about the past year to the goals that I have for next.

[00:03:38] Now, will I transfer a lot of this into Notion so I can do digital tracking for them? Absolutely. But that has to be a secondary thing because I think we wanna do what we can to set ourselves up for success. And even though [00:04:00] it can feel like maybe a pain, if you're not used to it, ultimately if you can do something small, like write everything down by hand on a piece of paper with a great pen, and know that that will help you succeed better, why not?

[00:04:18] Right? So that's gonna be something I'll be doing today. There's a lot of good annual review setups out there. I really like Chris Guillebeau's and I really like Elise Joy's. There's a few out there. But I hope that if you do an annual review, you write it down too, and maybe it might make a difference. Thanks for listening.

[00:04:47] Talk to you tomorrow.