I did this exercise last year right around the same time. It’s a really easy and revealing review exercise to do, thanks to Tim Ferriss who first coined and shared it on his blog. To recap, here’s how it’s done:

1. Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.

2. Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.

3. For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.

4. Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”

5. Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2019. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.

?POSITIVE

1. ?Doing keto and intermittent fasting, gaining my health back, and weight loss of 10kg back to mid-20s weight
2. ?Quitting consulting and doing my indie products - autonomy, pace, following my energy and curiosity
3. ?Happy changes in the family, managing my mother’s knee surgeries well
4. ?Doing monthly goals and reviews since August
5. ?Planning my most audacious goals yet - to earn a $1mil
6. ?Writing everyday for more than a year now
7. ?Working with my hands and learning a traditional Japanese craft, kintsugi
8. ?Living as a local in Kyoto, seeing sakura for the first time and immersing in its poetic beauty
9. Self-learning coding, marketing, financial literacy, habit formation
10. Working at the inspiring, expansive space that is Jewel Changi Airport
11. Reading books like Atomic Habits, Antifragile, How Luck Happens, It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work, The Millionaire Fastlane
12. Understanding habit formation as a skill and creating my micro-habit schedules
13. Discovering podcasts
14. Discovering Naval Ravikant, Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock, James Clear, Jason Fried/DHH
15. Making my first PHP apps on a Udemy course sponsored by the Singapore Government - weather forecast, secret diary, Bootstrap landing page
16. Making my first Rails app - Your Life In Months
17. Making another nocode product ‘accidentally’ and getting sponsorship - Keto List Singapore
18. Discovering JAMstack and making my first JAMstack business - Sweet Jam Sites
19. Discovering single origin coffees and developing a taste for pure black
20. Discovering a new brand of traditional mooncakes during the mid-autumn festival

?NEGATIVE

1. ?Not holding my boundaries for work, letting people steal from me - money, goodwill, optimism, wellbeing
2. ?Relapse scare for my chronic health condition, and learning that my body is my harshest teacher (which ended up being a good thing)
3. ?Not (yet) earning my first MRR - it’s been 6 months in since I started on my indie maker journey, and though I had earned some money from my products, I have no MRR to show for, nor a SaaS. If people can get to ramen profitability within a year, so can I. Must get better at monetization, marketing, acquisition.
4. Not enjoying my short Bhutan work trip and my Bali retreat - good learning point about the future of such opportunities. 
5. Didn’t get to upgrade my iPhone this year (again)

⚖️Summing up

My positive leaders were -

❤️my health goals (new)

?the happiness of my family (recurring)

?‍?having the autonomy to plan and to do what I love everyday (recurring)

?learning/being inspired by new shit (i.e. country, craft, goals, activities) (recurring)

✈️less travel needs this year it seems (omitted) 

My negative leaders were recurring themes from last year -

?poor health and toxicity (again)

?‍♂️not being able to hold my boundaries well for work (again)

?not hitting my monetary goals (new)

?interestingly, that’s all there is for my negatives. I think I did something right this year, when my positives are 4x as numerous as my negatives

Now, on to scheduling my top positive leaders into my 2020 calendar (and not add anything from my not-to-do list of negatives)!