Twitter’s done it, so has yahoo, and now it’s time that you should consider doing it too – that is conducting your very own 2011 year in review. The year in review is a collection of the highlights (and sometimes the low-lights as well!) of your band’s year, or if you’re not in a band, it works just as good for your individual year as well and you can apply it to any and all areas of your life, any career, any industry – anyone and everyone can benefit from conducting a year in review!
To begin with, you might want to get an idea of what others have done – for a musically-specific year in review, About.com’s ‘2011- the Year in Punk Rock’ is a great place to start, or you can check out twitter’s extensive year in review site which has sections covering the year in stories, hot topics, who joined, tweets per second and more, while yahoo ‘s year in review covers the top 10 searches, news stories, heroic acts, viral pictures, and extreme weather, among other things. You can also try googling ‘year in review’, adding other keywords if you like, to find more inspiration and music/ career/topic-specific reviews to peruse.
Next, you want to think back on your year, looking through photos and updates on your Facebook, twitter or other social media accounts from the year may help you jog your memory of what when down, and more importantly provide you with details of exactly when. You can then do your review in two ways, you can either just focus on the positive and write down the highlights from each month, for example if you’re in a band your review might go something like this – January, received copies of our very first CD, February, played a show supporting our favorite band, March, had CD release party, April, went on our first east coast tour! May, played our biggest show ever to 3,000 people, June, designed our best tshirt yet, July, signed with a management company etc etc etc. This leaves you with a record of your great work throughout the year that you can use to remind you of all the good things you’ve done and how far you’ve come.
However on the flipside of this, you can also list both positive and negative items, with the idea that you can use this as a tool to see what worked and what didn’t so you know what you have to work on for next time (we will discuss how to use your year in review to do this soon!), though be sure to add a lot of good items to outweigh any slightly less favorable items on your list so that you can celebrate your achievements while learning about how to improve for next year.
After you have a list, you can do several things with it, you can post it as a blog piece if you have a blog or tumblr page, you can print it out and give a copy to your band members to stick on their fridges, or you can simply keep it for yourself, either way, expand on it as much as you like, using pictures, videos or links to illustrate your points where they seem appropriate, and you will have a solid record of what you achieved this year, and potentially the beginnings of a great blueprint for the next one.
