How I Reflected on the Past Year

Hi Zenith Catcher,

Welcome to the first issue of the rebranded newsletter Zenith Sunday, formerly known as Zenit Montag. I hope you had a merry Christmas.

I love the period between the old and the new year because I can think about the past year and plan the new year ahead. This is why I will explain two things today: 1. The exact routine I went through to reflect on the entire past year, 2024, and 2. How I gathered feedback from my co-workers to improve in work and life in 2025. The former exercise helped me to identify the people, activities, and commitments that caused peak positive or negative emotions in 2024. The latter should help me to become a more pleasant co-worker in the new year. Let’s start with No. 1.

1. Forget New Year’s Resolutions and Conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ Instead

For many years, I believed that planning the new year and diligently thinking about what I wanted to accomplish in the upcoming 52 weeks was the only thing to do when I had time between Christmas and the forthcoming year. The truth is that this led to a narrow focus on the future (new year) without learning from the past year.

My beliefs about this fundamentally changed when I came across a blog post by Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek. There, he wrote:

“I’m often asked about how I approach New Year’s resolutions. The truth is that I no longer approach them at all, even though I did for decades. Why the change? I have found “past year reviews” (PYR) more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions.”

Personally, I still plan the next year and write down my New Year’s resolutions. However, I will first reflect on the old year before thinking about the hypothetical future. This routine took me the last two times around 4-6 hours. If you’re a speedster, you will presumably get it done in 30-60 minutes.

So here’s how I did the PYR for the past 2 years:

1. I opened a note in Evernote and created two sections: Positive and Negative. You can also use Google Docs, Word, or a piece of paper.
2. I pulled up my Google Calendar from last year and looked at every single week and day.
3. For each week, I wrote down in the note document any people, activities, or commitments that caused peak positive or negative emotions for that week. I put them in their respective columns, Positive or Negative.
4. Once I had gone through the past year, I looked at the two sections and asked, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?” (Pareto principle).
5. Then, I created two new sections called “Positive Leaders” and “NOT-TO-DO LIST” (Negative Leaders) and filled them up based on the previous question.
6. Based on the answers, I took my “Positive Leaders” and scheduled more of them in the new year (frankly I have not yet completed this yet for 2025 ;) ). Ferriss says this: “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.”
7. Lastly, I was left with my negative leaders, which built up my “NOT-TO-DO LIST” for the new year. These are the people, activities, and commitments that make me feel bad, so I try to avoid putting them on my calendar just because of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other made-up nonsense.

To make it easier for you, I created a step-by-step explanation from Ferriss’s blog post and a template you can copy to start your Past Year Review now. CLICK HERE to access for free.

That’s it. If you try it, reply to this email and give me feedback on how it works for you.

This routine helped me cut out people with different values in the past year and focus on the work I’m truly interested in. Although it was not always easy to stick to the “NO-TO-DO LIST” or pursue things from the “Positive Leader” section, it helped me know what to use as a guideline.

2. If You Want To Get Better, You Need To Ask For Feedback Actively

I think that successful people like Alex Hormozi, Elon Musk, or Naval Ravikant are highly coachable and have freaking high standards. In their mind, great isn’t just good enough. They seek excellence in pursuing their “main thing” and can iterate fast when getting new feedback.

Inspired by them, I always try to become a better team member within my current startup project Deallense (where we do software/SaaS), or as part of my volunteering work at Swisspreneur, where I work in the Syndicate Team, where I manage the investor relations and some tasks beyond that. A way to gather feedback, identify blind spots in my behavior, learn about my strengths, and realize things I could do better is by sending a survey form to the co-workers with whom I spent the most time in the given year. I heard for the first time about this yearly routine from my mentor, Silvan Krähenbühl, who performs a similar annual routine.

Said that here’s exactly how I did it for the first time this year:

1. I created a Google Form and inserted the following text and questions:
2. Title: Feedback on Working with Nicola Flückiger in 2024
3. Subtile: Hi! Thank you for working with me this year. I’d love your honest feedback to learn and grow. This will only take a few minutes.
4. Question 1: What is Nicola doing well?
5. Question 2: What could Nicola do better?
6. Question 3: What are Nicola’s strengths?
7. Question 4: What are Nicola’s weaknesses?
8. Anything else you’d like to share?
9. Your Name (Optional)
10. Then, I made a list of the 10-20 people I spent the most time with at work this year.
11. I sent them this message: Hey [Name], I’m trying to get better at what I do and thought it’d be cool to ask for your honest thoughts about working with me this year at [Project Name]. It’s super short—just stuff like what’s been good, what I could do better, and anything else you think I should know. Here’s the link to the feedback form: [Link to form] It would mean a lot to me if you could share your thoughts. Thanks so much, and Merry Christmas! Nicola
12. After a few days I evaluated the results. So far I got 7 responses. I cluster the results in 4 buckets: 1. Doing Well, 2. Could Improve, 3. Strenghts, 4. Weaknesses. Click here to read a summary of my evaluation.

That’s again it. Pretty simple.

At first, I thought sending this to all the people I worked with this year could annoy them, but the opposite was true. People were very happy to provide feedback, and some even got inspired to do the same, like me, and ask for feedback as well.

Conclusion

In this newsletter issue, I wanted to convey the message that not only planning the new year is crucial but also thinking about the past 365 days. Secondly, I made the point that if you want to get better as a team member or co-worker, you need to ask the people around you for feedback. Nobody else does this for you. So, by doing just this (Past Year Review + Asking for Feedback), you are already in the top 1% of people on this planet. I’m not saying this is the right approach; this is just what currently works for me. This might change in the future.

I’ll leave you with this for the new year: The bar has never been so low to win, but it has also never been so easy to get distracted.

Let’s crush 2025!

Warmly,

Nicola

PS: What did I do for the past 2.5 years, and why didn’t I publish any newsletters? The answers you will learn in my newest podcast episode: #183: I’m Back (What I Did For 2.5 Years). Listen on YouTube (new), Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This week on the Catch The Zenith Podcast:

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Inspiring Things This Week:

Gadget: I received the Apple AirPods Max as a Christmas gift. For a long time, I had considered buying them, but the price held me back. Now that I have them and have used them during some lengthy deep work sessions, I can say they are excellent. I particularly appreciate their noise-canceling function, which I use most often since I prefer to work in silence. Here is the link.

Book: I’ve started rereading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl for the second or third time. From my perspective, it’s one of the best books ever written. It helped me understand the space between a stimulus and your reaction. In other words, you can always make a conscious decision when confronted with a thought, situation, or circumstance—anything. Here’s the link.

Quote of the Week:

Video Recommendations:

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