How to do a year-end review of your notes and todos

By December, a year of captures has piled up: finished tasks, abandoned ideas, notes from meetings you have forgotten, and a long tail of todos that have been “next week” since June. A year-end review is a single sitting that turns that pile into something useful, and lets you start January without carrying the whole year with you.

Give it an hour, ideally in the quiet week before a holiday.

1. Close the stale todos

Start with open todos older than three months. For each, decide honestly:

• Still matters and has a date: keep it, with a real date in January or later.
• Still matters but no date: keep it only if you would genuinely start it.
• No longer matters: delete it.

Most people delete half. That is not failure. Priorities change, and a list full of old intentions makes the current ones harder to see. If the backlog is enormous, task bankruptcy is a cleaner reset.

2. Skim the notes for what mattered

Scroll through the year’s notes quickly, month by month. You are looking for:

• Ideas you still believe in.
• Decisions that will matter next year.
• Things you learned that you want to keep.

Copy the ones worth keeping into a single “carry forward” note. Leave the rest where they are; they are still searchable if you ever need them.

3. Write down what you finished

Search your done todos and pick the five to ten that mattered most. This is the raw material for a year-end self review, a promotion case, or simply the satisfaction of seeing that the year was not a blur. If you keep a work log, this step is mostly done already; see how to keep a work log on Windows.

4. Notice the patterns

Look at what kept recurring. Tasks you moved again and again usually point to something: a commitment you do not really want, a process that needs fixing, or a task that is too vague to start. Write down one or two changes for next year.

5. Back up the year

Before you start fresh, make sure the year is safe. Jot keeps daily local backups for a week, and its markdown export writes your notes to a folder you can copy anywhere. A year-end export is a good habit; the details are in backups that are just files.

6. Set up January

Finish by giving the first week of January three or four dated todos: the things you want to start the year with. A short list is the point. The goal is a clean first morning, not a plan for the whole year.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.