Time to Value: 7 mins
As a follow-up to last week’s “Q4 Isn’t About Saving 2025—It’s About Setting Up 2026,” let’s discuss how we actually review our past year.
Throughout my career, I’ve noticed year-end reflection is often superficial—we only really reflect during performance reviews when we’re justifying a promotion or raise. So we walk into new strategy sessions with the same biases and no new lessons learned.
I learned the hard way that a mindset shift matters. Changing my approach to year-end reflections consistently helped me plan for both best and worst-case scenarios heading into the new year.
Here are some tips, that helped reframe my approach
👥 People: The Recency Bias Trap
Here’s the thing about year-end reflections: our minds focus on moments when we were really happy or really sad, and we forget everything else in between. We forget the patterns. We forget the trends. We miss what was actually happening because we’re fixated on one high or one low.
This recency bias shows up everywhere when you’re reviewing projects, evaluating team performance, or looking back at business outcomes.
The Three Stories We Tell Ourselves:
1. The Rose-Tinted Glasses
We look at everything that went well as things we planned and completely owned. But often, success happened because of factors outside our control: market timing, a competitor’s mistake, an unexpected referral.
The question to ask: Did we cause this success, or did we just happen to be in the right place?
2. The Blame Game
When things didn’t work out, we focus on the negative. It was that person who didn’t deliver. It was the team that missed the deadline. We point fingers instead of looking at root causes.
Better questions to ask: Was it lack of skills? Too many priorities? Insufficient resources? Inability to communicate when stuck? Each root cause suggests a different fix: coaching, reducing scope, better systems, or yes—sometimes exiting the person, product, or market
3. The Selective Memory
We often to recall recent and dramatic events, often overlooking the consistent patterns that truly influence outcomes, whether positive or negative.
How to Counter This:
The simple antidote is to go back to your notes. Look at what you documented during that time. Your past self captured things your present self has already rewritten.
I always find it best to look at my Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 notes. It’s almost like a diary that gives me a complete picture of where I was, what my challenges were, when I was struggling.
You can even have AI read your notes and ask: What themes do you see? What were the gaps? Paint me a story of what happened. Help me see my blind spots.
Try this week: Pull your quarterly notes or key meeting summaries from 2025. Read them chronologically. What patterns do you see that you’d already forgotten?
⚙️ Process: Continue, Stop, Start
When examining your processes, I always use this simple framework:
What should we CONTINUE?
Which processes actually worked for your team? What created the outcomes you wanted? What felt smooth even as you scaled?
What should we STOP?
What processes are slowing you down? Maybe your onboarding cycle for new clients is too long. Maybe your reconciliation process for getting money back to clients is daunting. Maybe there’s a process people don’t actually follow (which tells you it’s broken).
What should we START?
What’s missing? What new systems does your business need now that it’s at a different stage?
The Critical Question:
Are your processes ready for version 2.0 of your business?
Many of the systems that got you to $500K aren’t the ones that will get you to $2M. Year-end gives you the opportunity to identify which processes you’ve outgrown and need to rebuild in the new year.
Examples to Audit:
- Client onboarding: Is it still taking 60 days when it should take 30?
- Decision-making: Are approvals still routing through you when they should be delegated?
- Cross-functional handoffs: Where do things consistently get stuck between teams?
- Reporting: Are you spending two weeks compiling data that should be automated?
Conduct a proper audit of what’s working for your systems and business, and identify which ones you’ve outgrown.
Try this week: Pick one process that frustrated you repeatedly in 2025. Ask your team: “If we could redesign this from scratch, what would it look like?” You might be surprised by what they suggest.
📊 Data: What the Numbers Actually Tell You
Data is really key. But we have to ask the right questions of it.
What is the data telling you about your people?
- Are certain team members consistently delivering while others struggle?
- Are new hires taking longer to ramp than they should?
- Where are the skill gaps you need to address?
What is the data telling you about your customer experience?
- Which customers expanded with you vs. churned?
- Where in the customer journey do people get stuck?
- What support issues keep repeating?
What is the data telling you about your promotions and marketing?
- Which channels actually drove revenue vs. just drove traffic?
- What campaigns converted vs. what felt busy?
- Where did you spend money without seeing returns?
What is the data telling you about your ability to execute?
- How many initiatives did you start vs. complete?
- Which goals did you hit vs. which ones quietly disappeared?
- Where did projects stall, and why?
Look at all these data points and ask: What do they reveal about what actually drove outcomes this year?
Try this week: Pull three key metrics you tracked all year. Ask: Did these metrics actually predict the outcomes I cared about? Or was I tracking the wrong things?
🧠 Tonio’s Corner: My Notes Are My Truth
At the end of the year, I go back to my notes. Always.
My pub notes, my meeting notes, my voice memos—they’ve always helped me identify patterns and keep track of what actually happened, not what I think happened.
When I review them quarter by quarter, I see the full picture. I can tell you exactly where I was struggling, what my team was dealing with, and what kept me up at night. The notes don’t lie.
And here’s what I’ve learned: it’s human nature to avoid discomfort and conflict. We drift away from hard truths because they’re uncomfortable.
But avoiding that personal conflict won’t help you see what’s happening clearly. It won’t help you make the necessary decisions to move your business forward.
So don’t get stuck looking at 2025 through biased lenses.
2026 is there for the taking. 2025 is already done. Focus on the future.
But before you plan that future, make sure you understand what actually happened in the past not the story you’ve told yourself about it.
Try this week: Set aside 90 minutes. Read your notes from January, April, July, and October 2025. What surprised you? What did you forget? What patterns emerged?
What’s one pattern from 2025 that you only see clearly now, looking back? Share in the comments 👇
New here? I’m Tonio, and I help scaling leaders build systems that grow people and profits. Follow for weekly frameworks that turn leadership chaos into competitive advantage.
