Mem.ai Tutorial: How to Conduct An Annual Review

Are you looking for a way to cultivate self-knowledge, learn from your experiences, and observe, reflect, and write about the past year? Then an annual review might be just the thing for you. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to conduct an annual review in Mem, a powerful note-taking and knowledge-generation tool.

The framework I’m going to use is based on something called The Year Compass, which you can download as a free PDF. I’ve created a Mem template for you that you can use, so you don’t have to worry about filling out the PDF.

But whydo this in Mem, when you can just fill out the PDF? First of all, it allows you to compare this year to the previous year if you’ve been using Mem for more than a year. You’ll end up having a rich archive of your thoughts and experiences, giving you much more flexibility lthan a PDF. You can also link notes from different events, giving you a more comprehensive view of your experiences.

Now that you know why you should do this in Mem, let’s talk about how to do it. The first thing you need to do is break this up into manageable parts. The goal isn’t to just fly through this—the whole point is to take time to pause and reflect, and do this slowly. Take your time with it. You can create Mems for each header and do one part every day.

Let’s look at an example Mem for the annual review. This will give you an idea of how to reflect on what the past year was about in a very easy and concise way. You can see that it looks at the various areas of life, such as personal life and family, career, hobbies, physical fitness, mental health, and habits that defined you.

Take the time to write down all the most significant events that happened under each of these categories. Our memories are not particularly reliable, so this will help you get an objective view of the experiences you’ve had.

For example, Ryder Carol talks about a guy who had been on multiple dates with a girl. He wrote bullet journal entries after each date, and when she broke up with him at first, he was really depressed. But when he looked back at the entries, he realized she hadn’t actually been that nice to him and it gave him an objective view of the experiences he had.

The weekly review gives you an opportunity to observe, reflect, and write about what’s most important to you. If you want, you can turn this into a new Mem and combine all of these sections into one. Or you could do the same thing for next year, setting goals for the next year.

The great thing about doing this in Mem is that it will be right there at the top of your Mem every day when you log in. So if you want to, for example, create a “Dare to Dream Big” Mem for 2023, it will be right there and you’ll see it every day.

That’s the basic overview of how to conduct an annual review in Mem. I’ve included a link to my Mem template, but you can also download the free PDF at The Year Compass. I go through it every year, and I think it’s one of the most powerful tools out there.