I dunno who needs to hear this, but you cannot look ahead without first looking back.
And no, I don't mean in the passive way where you're simply ~thinking about everything that happened this year (and forgetting 90% of it)~.
We need the facts. We need the data. We need to write this shit out.
You know how like every financial guru on the internet talks about how if you want to get clear about where all your money is running off to, you have to literally pull out your bank statements and physically go through the line items to really understand the cold hard numbers?
We're gonna do that—except not for your finances (well, you could do that too, I'm probably going to do that as well lmfao).
We're gonna do it for your life—aka, we're going to get clear on what exactly you all did this year. How you spent your time, where you went, etc etc etc.
(This is reason #908234098 why I start this in November, because this is a task that needs some real time & attention.)
Now personally, I like to put this data into a few categories:
- Business
- Lifestyle/Fun Things
- Artist Career (because I'm an actor too)
- Health & Wellness
- Finances
(Obviously yours will be different based on what you do and what you value.)
And I'll go through each month and compile all the highlights. What clients did I work with? What new offers did I create? What did I do on the weekends? How many auditions did I have? Was I consistent with the gym?
And so on, and so forth. Anything that feels like something to remember (either good or bad), it gets written down.
At this point, I already knooooow you're like—"Sarah, I don't have data to pull out about everything I did this year. And I can't even remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, much less what I was doing back in January."
But that's okay, because you actually DO have a way to collect this data, in the form of:
- iPhone photos
- Instagram story archives
- Emails
- Texts
- Credit card statements
- DMs
- Your gym's app
- The downloads folder on your computer
- .. and I'm sure more that I'm just not thinking of rn.
Like, off the top of my head, I absolutely
would not have remembered seeing Wicked in February with
BTL Sara, but if I went through my credit card statements, I would have seen The Gershwin on there and remembered. (And probs on my instagram story too.)
Now, I know I'm making this task seem like a ~data driven~ moment, and it is, but it's actually really freaking fun.
Like how often do you actually go back and remember a year like this? (It's particularly fun to do during Thanksgiving week because chances are, you'll have no choice but to feel grateful for all the experiences you've had this year.)
Pour yourself a glass of wine and make it a ~moment~.
And then meet me back here next week for part 2, where I'm gonna tell you what to do with all this data ;)
