Yearly Planning and Goal Setting, Part 1

2024 in Review

Copyright Lauren Hall, 2024. Our neighbors’ awesome two-house light display.

This week I’m throwing together two posts that will hopefully give readers a sense of how I bring the concept of radical moderation into my workflow. I’m an academic, associate dean, wife and mother of three, and Substack author pitching a book to agents and publishers. As you can tell, there’s a lot going on.

This post focuses on the practice of doing an annual review of your life each year. You can buy all sorts of fancy programs or look up various templates on the internet, but I do annual reviews more ad hoc. I look over my goals and priorities from the previous year, review my strategic plan (more on that Thursday) and make some lists, some of which you’ll see below.

All annual reviews revolve around three primary questions:

What went well?
What didn’t?
What’s next?

But before we get into the annual review itself, why bother?

Well, it turns out that annual reviews do a few really important things.

First, they (likely) help you feel better about your frenetic daily activities. Despite outward appearances, living in my brain at any given moment is a bit like watching a poorly executed game of pinball. Precisely because I always feel like I’m teetering right on the verge of total chaos, doing an annual review helps to remind me that despite the seeming dysfunction a lot gets done. It also helps move me away from a scarcity mindset and into a more grateful abundance mindset. These words are all a little goopy given how they’re over-used in the wellness world, but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful. If you had asked me before doing my annual review how 2024 went, I would have said “it was ok. Really busy, lots of travel.” Hardly inspiring. Once I got everything written down though, I could see more clearly that 2024 was one hell of a year that I’m really proud of. And it’s providing some much-needed motivation for 2025.

Second, annual reviews help identify both friction points and practices that really made a difference not only in my outputs but also in the way I feel about all the exciting things I’m working on. More on that toward the end, but annual reviews are how we see patterns in our lives, both good and bad. Until you can see those patterns it’s hard to do anything about them.

Finally, doing a yearly review can help anyone dealing with the imposter syndrome that often bedevils academics, writers, and other people engaged in any kind of creative output. It’s easy to feel like you’re on a treadmill or like everyone else is doing amazing things while you’re on the fringes. A yearly review provides a more objective view of the things you were able to accomplish and areas you might need to work on.

Annual reviews do a few things that radical moderates really like: they help us manage complexity, they help us develop gratitude for what we have and for the work we’ve put in, and they help us identify and deal with the inevitable tradeoffs in our lives.

Without further ado, here’s my annual review with some additional commentary at the end.

2024 by the numbers

This year was an outlier in terms of travel and talks, in part because I was gearing up to promote the book manuscript and catch the eye of agents and publishers (more on that later). I also had institutional support from my Pluralism Fellowship, which lit a motivational fire and provided additional networking opportunities.

Some rough totals:

Blog posts: 26
Podcast interviews: 4
Op-eds: 1 post-election at Real Clear Politics and some other things I can’t locate but should (see pinball comment above)
Invited Talks: 7

In a bit more detail:

Some notable talks included:
State Policy Network, Phoenix - talk on radical moderation
Heterodox Academy Conference, Chicago - universities as neutral cartographers
Pluralism Summit, Virginia - talk on radical moderation
APSA pre-conference symposium, Philadelphia - talk on radical moderation
American Public Health Association pre-conference symposium, Minneapolis - talk on health care reform
Zoom to medical students - talk on health care reform

Blog Progress: Growth has been admittedly slow for reasons I discuss a bit later on, but I can also clearly see some patterns from the handy data below that Substack puts together. I intentionally increased posts to around one per week this fall while also ramping up talks and external promotion. That work clearly paid off. When I stopped posting as much at the end of the year due to administrative duties and the need for a break, views fell considerably. I’ll keep that in mind for 2025.

Conferences and work trips in 2024:
Part of the reason writing was slower than I would have liked is that I also had a bunch of other work trips for conferences and professional development, requiring travel to Manhattan, Dubai, Indianapolis, New Orleans (for the PPE Society), Providence, and Santa Fe. Traveling this much is kind of fun, but it also takes a hit out of my ability to stay on top of writing, promotion, and life in general (quality family time and workouts take a hard hit too, as I discuss below).

Podcast interviews recorded in 2024:
Campbell Conversations (NPR podcast)
The Curious Task
The Great Antidote
Wilk Wilkinson (taped in 2024, coming out in 2025)

Radical Moderation Book Progress:
As of early 2024, I had a full working draft of the book and in June 2024 I held a book manuscript workshop where a fantastic group of scholars with public writing experience tore the book apart (kindly) and gave me lots of feedback that I’ll combine with whatever an agent or editor adds in. Overall, I’m really proud of the draft and looking forward to getting it placed.

Publications in 2024:
While my primary writing right now is on radical moderation here and via the book manuscript, I had a couple other publications this year that kept my academic pipeline moving along:

• Most exciting, I have an article coming out any day now in Social Philosophy and Policy called “Structural Hobbling: Regulatory Power, Unfreedom, and Structural Injustice.” This one took about five years of mental juggling to figure out. It may end up becoming the basis for my third academic book, but that writing will have to wait until the radical moderation book has an agent/publisher.

• “Children and the Family” (with Andrew Jason Cohen), in the Companion to Libertarianism (Routledge 2024). This one was fun because I rarely get to co-author things and Andrew is a fantastic scholar and collaborator (his Substack is here).

• “Toward a Classical Liberal Sociological Theory of Health Care”, in Sociology and Classical Liberalism, (Palgrave, 2024). This was another fun project where I got to play a bit in a field that I’m less conversant in (sociology). Lots of themes from my second book, on health care regulations and medicalization.

• I also finished a book review for a new-ish book on Burke’s political economy that will come out in spring in the Review of Politics and I also refereed a number of articles for various journals.

Connections and Networking*:
2024 was a big networking year too. All the travel paid off with opportunities to partner with amazing organizations doing work in the pluralism and civil discourse space.

Some notable partnerships include:
1) Pluralism Fellow for Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Discourse
2) Board of advisors for the Prohuman Foundation
3) Movement Partner with the Builders Movement
4) Connections to scholars and practitioners doing wonderful work, including Martin Carcasson, Chip Hauss, Kevin Loker, and many others. I also completed The Op-Ed Project (my participation generously funded by Interfaith America), which helped re-motivate my op-ed writing and linked me up with scholars like historian Mary Fissell, whose book on the history of abortion is coming out in March (check it out!).

*Long sidebar: It’s worth noting of the networking piece that each of these opportunities came out of my doing something very foreign to my nature: actively networking and engaging in self-promotion. All of the opportunities that emerged in 2024 snowballed from a single connection I made at a Markets and Society conference in fall 2022. I was at the conference, dreading small talk, and reading through the list of folks attending. I saw Ben Klutsey’s name, who was then the director of the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange at Mercatus. Feeling like a complete idiot and a raging imposter, I singled him out, told him about my work on radical moderation, and asked if he knew of any opportunities or connections that might help with the Substack or the book project. That single conversation bore more fruit than any other single thing I’ve done (other than the actual writing) in the last three years. Ben connected me with his staff in the Program, who then created incredible network effects that I’m still trying to keep up with. Keep the power of network effects in mind when you’re debating whether it’s worth it to look like a complete idiot by grabbing random strangers for coffee or Zooms. I’m not good at networking and self-promotion and I don’t love doing it. But I can also see clearly (via this annual review!) that the opportunities I’ve gotten have quadrupled in the last three years as I’ve gotten more comfortable talking about my work and owning my talents. It’s still not easy, but it’s been very worth it.

Associate Dean work:
This was also an unusually busy year in the Associate Dean world and I had some exciting wins. All of these involved partners from across our college and campus, but to keep things reasonably short (and it’s my annual review, not theirs) I’ll center my participation:

I led the development and kick-off of our college’s Los Angeles initiative, culminating in 16 of our students going to study transmedia storytelling in LA this past fall.

I got to see (and run interference) for our first full cohort of interdisciplinary large-scale classes kick off in our new SHED building on campus. This is the culmination of my first big project (and development fundraising ask) as associate dean and seeing it come to fruition was really exciting.

I developed an advanced certificate in Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution with our Kosovo campus, which was a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare, but we got it formally approved by the state in summer 2024. The first cohort of students will be able to start enrolling in summer 2025. I’m really proud that I was able to support our Kosovo colleagues who often don’t get the recognition they deserve for the incredible work they do in the conflict resolution space.

I served on our university’s presidential search committee, which was a ton of work but gave me some really good perspective on the university as a whole. Lots of tea I’ll never be able to spill thanks to signing an NDA. Sigh.

I also helped kick off the general education revision process for our entire university and started co-chairing the task force in fall 2024, which will continue through next year (at least).

Fun and Relaxation in 2024
Lest I think I never have any fun at all, looking over my calendar I see that I took the kids on vacation to Cancun in January, spent a full week in Dubai for a work trip in March where we did a ton of sight-seeing and ate everything in sight, did some camping with my sister and our families in our pop-up campers, spent a week at an idyllic lake house with my in-laws for their semi-annual family reunion, and spent a week unplugged at our family cabin in August. I also had a glorious two weeks over this past Christmas break where I did almost no writing or work at all (sorry/notsorry) and hung out with visiting and local family and did some much-needed home organization. I don’t do work on vacations (unless there’s some kind of bureaucratic emergency, which rarely happens), so these were all total breaks from writing, administrating, and email. I was also pretty good at avoiding work on evenings and weekends (mostly) and I did a pretty good job of reading to the kids each night before bed. We worked through a bunch of the Oz books in 2024 and I might be ready for something like Narnia for 2025.

Finally, I joined the 500# club in the weightlifting world at the end of 2024 this year, hitting a combined 500 pounds on my deadlift (solid 240), back squat (solid 180), and bench press (90, a bit light due to elbow issues).

Overall, 2024 was a pretty great year, both personally and professionally. It felt reasonably balanced, apart from a few weeks where travel dates came too close together or deadlines came on top of each other. I’m not entirely sure how to avoid that in the future, given that I simply don’t have total control over what trips happen when or when deadlines are, but it’s something to keep an eye on. But I felt like I had pretty decent control over workload and I didn’t drop (many) balls. Those I did drop I was able to pick back up again pretty quickly. Home life felt a bit more chaotic than I’d like (on top of everything else we’re doing a major home renovation like complete idiots), so getting more centered at home will be a primary focus for 2025.

Key Takeaways

What did you learn from reading this annual review (if you got this far)? Hopefully it was not a lesson in comparison. I have a habit of overcommitting. I joke with concerned family members that I’m like a shark in that if I stop moving I’ll die. I feel fulfilled when I’m operating at around 95% capacity as long as I have some scheduled downtime mixed in. Right now it’s feeling like a pretty good balance.

Other people are different (who knew?). Some need more like 60/40 and others have limitations that I don’t (newborns, chronic or acute illnesses, caretaking for elderly parents, etc.). The goal of an annual review is NOT to put on a hair shirt and compare yourself to the other people out there living different lives. The goal is to get a better idea of what your unique landscape looks like, create an objective summary of what you accomplished, locate patterns if you can see any, and figure out how you would like to feel and what you’d like to accomplish in the upcoming year.

What did I learn from doing this annual review?

First, I was able to shake off a bit of the post-holiday doldrums. I had a great year! I honestly did not recognize how awesome of a year this was until I put it all down on paper. So that’s win #1 and well worth the few hours it took to pull it all together. (FYI an annual review that’s not a blog post shouldn’t take more than an hour to do. This one has links and needed to be edited for public consumption, so it’s taking longer).

Second, I’m able to see some patterns that I’d like to tackle in 2025. A few goals I had for 2024 were personal and involved consistent workouts and spending quality time with the kids each night. Overall, I’m pretty happy with both those, but there's room for improvement for both.

Workouts were generally pretty consistent, coming in below my reach goal of 5/week but pretty consistently hitting my 3 workouts/week minimum. Given where I am with three young kids at home and no time for external gym visits, I’m fine with this right now.

I’m also pretty happy with the QT kids piece, with some caveats below.

One pattern that is really obvious is that workouts, QT with kids, and writing output fall apart around travel. When I fall out of my routine I fall out of it like a drunk college student at a bar singing to Journey. It’s not pretty. And just as with that drunk Journey singalong, there’s a hangover effect too; it often takes me almost a week to get back into my routine once I’m back home. I’m working on ways to avoid the travel routine hangover, but if anyone has suggestions, please let me know!

Another pattern that affects family time, workouts, and writing time is the ubiquity of my phone. I need to get better at keeping it in a different room during the evening and being really strategic with it in the morning. Otherwise, I use it as a distraction, which results in workouts taking too long (or not happening at all), quality time with my family or my writing time being cut short because I was dinking around on LinkedIn or reading some random BuzzFeed article about organizational products I need for 2025 (spoiler: I do not need these items).

Another pattern is that I had very little time or energy for non-research related reading. I read classic mystery novels before bed and you can pry those from my cold, dead, hands. But the best way to keep writing inspiration going is to make sure you’re reading enough in your area of interest to generate new ideas. I’ve been struggling to do that and will need a plan of attack to reintroduce more moderation-related reading for 2025. I’m not entirely sure where this fits in, but I have some ideas.

Another pattern that’s somewhat related to the last point is that I need to figure out a better way to plan and execute Substack content. My brain rebels against strict content planning. It sulks and refuses to cooperate at all if I try to schedule specific types of posts at specific times. As a result, those fancy monthly content planners that I keep downloading and hoping I’ll magically use are useless. But I also can’t hope for inspiration on Tuesday for a post I need to schedule for Thursday. I have some ideas, but if other people with rebellious brains have ideas about organizing regular content generation, I’m all ears.

Finally, an interesting thing I hadn’t noticed is that two of my goals for 2024 - finances and spiritual growth - aren’t represented here at all. And it’s not an accident that they kind of fell by the wayside this year. Things got crazy and the things without external accountability fell off the map. That’s pretty typical for me, but not something I want to continue. I’ll need to keep both those areas in mind as I develop my plan for 2025.

This got really long, so I’ll end with some concrete advice for those interested in doing an annual review.

Your Turn

To start your own annual review, you’ll need a pad of paper and a pen. I also need to jog my memory, so I keep my digital calendar, my plan of work for the past year (more on that on Thursday), and my email handy so I can look things up and try to remember what the hell I was doing in March or November or last week (deep sigh). If you have a better memory than I do (very likely) you may need less prodding.

After that, you just go through and ask yourself those key questions: What went well? What didn’t? and What’s next?

The format matters less than the act of getting things out onto a piece of paper so you can see the overview of the year and start digging around for patterns.

For additional ideas, here are some links for annual reviews that I like the look of, even though I don’t use either of them in particular.

James Clear has a super simple annual review process that’s quite nice and I wish I had read before I started this post. Alas!

Todoist has a nice overview of why annual reviews are important and how to do one.

There are also lots of journals that include annual reviews of some sort, so if you’re a long-hand kind of person, you can check those out. I used to use the Full Focus Planner. They include a quarterly review section that’s quite helpful. I’ll talk more about quarterly planning on Thursday.

Notice, this was my own personal annual review. When my husband and I do one (more limited) for our whole family, it obviously includes things like kids and dogs and vacation and more home-focused wins and friction points. You can adapt your annual review for your family, your workplace team, whoever. It’s nice and flexible because those three key questions apply to everyone who has to navigate a complex 4D landscape (which is all of us).

Overall, I hope it’s clear why doing an annual review is so helpful. I also hope that my review above gives you some ideas for how you can think about your own goals and priorities for 2025.

On Thursday I’ll be sharing the second part of my annual planning post, which deals with creating actual plans, goals, and priorities for the year. Annual reviews are a bit difficult (but not impossible) if you didn’t have any goals or priorities for the year in the first place. But if you get into the habit of putting together even a rough set of goals and outcomes you’d like to accomplish in 2025 it’s a lot easier to do your annual review at the end of it. It’s also easier to see your progress and easier to feel more motivated in the year to come.

As always, let me know what you think! I’d love to hear from readers about how you think about annual reviews, what you include, and how you felt about 2024 in general!