End-of-Year Checklist
10 tactics for clearing clutter, finding focus, and starting the next year strong.
How we end this season determines how we enter the next.
The end of the year can be a stressful, frantic sprint to the finish. Wrapping up work projects, running last minute holiday errands, attending Christmas parties and programs, juggling childcare with schools closed. It’s a lot.
Without serious focus and intention, it is easy to be swept away by the busyness of the season…and then find ourselves stumbling, disoriented and disheveled, into the New Year.
Instead of merely surviving the year-end, here are 10 practical choices we can all make that will help us to close out this year with poise, and set the stage to begin 2025 with confidence.
1 - Simplify Your Physical Spaces
What areas of your life or home have become overgrown? Look for things to downsize or minimize.
Your wardrobe, your garage or shed, those catch-all drawers and cupboards in the kitchen. Go through and get rid of anything you haven’t used in a year. Making your spaces a little less crowded brings a disproportionate feeling of order and agency.
2 - Clean Your Digital Spaces
Don’t bring unkempt, overflowing digital spaces with you into this next season.
Clean out the email inbox.
If it’s really bad, you can batch-archive everything that’s older than a couple of months. If you haven’t been able to avoid those messages this long, you’ll probably be fine without them. And for the rare few that might be relevant later, they’ll come up when it’s time and you can always search for them.
Clean up your to do lists and task managers.
This is my greatest digital sin—I won’t even tell you how big my “Things” inbox has gotten as I collect random ideas and tasks throughout the day.
Use this opportunity to implement a simple tag or category system so you’ll be more organized going forward.
Do an app audit
Delete what you don’t need or use.
Review every subscription you’re paying for, cancel anything that’s not a ‘need to have.’
Rearrange how your apps are laid out on your phone or desktop. This will reset your unconscious muscle memory for where your apps are and force you into a brief moment of awareness as you find where you’ve relocated them. This is your opportunity to stop and consider if you really need to open Instagram right now.
3 - Eat All Frogs
Brian Tracy’s bestselling book “Eat That Frog!” is about overcoming procrastination and becoming more productive. The main point behind the clickbaitey title is: if, among all your to-do’s, you have to eat a frog, you might as well do it first. Then you’ll be done with the most dreadful thing you need to do, and everything else will feel easier.
Don't go into the New Year with anything hanging over your head, if you can help it. Finish the project you've been procrastinating. Take care of that annoying errand or task you've been avoiding (that reminds me, I really need an oil change…). Have that hard conversation you've been dreading. An extra push to clear the decks this week could help you to relax far better over the holidays than if you leave things looming.
Just clean it all out, and let yourself be light as you start the next season.
4 - Remember and Reflect
At the transition from one year to the next, we’re usually thinking about all that we want to accomplish in the coming season. Goal-setting, resolutions, calendaring, etc. These are great things, but if we don’t first take the time to look back and process the year we’ve had, we deprive ourselves of so much that this season could give us.
Strategic reflection can be a life-altering practice that helps us enjoy the good things we experienced, bring closure to the things that are still lingering, and gather up the lessons we need to get out of the hard things we went through.
I’ve been practicing a “Year End Review” for almost a decade now. Here are a few reflection questions to get you started:
Where did I win this year?
What did I lose this year?
What do I never want to forget?
Where do I still need to heal?
You can download the full Year End Review guide for free here:
5 - Practice Gratitude
Nothing affects the atmosphere of our heart and mind more positively than gratitude. Take some time to call to mind the good things that this year brought you. A simple gratitude-journaling session can be a powerful way to catalogue the blessings you’ve been able to enjoy.
When you remember something good that God did, it’s a prompt to give him praise.
When you remember something good that something else did for you, it’s a prompt to send a voice memo or thank you card and let them know how much they mean to you.
Gratitude practice is like a cleanse for the soul, scouring away the gunky buildup of offense, bitterness, and negativity that so easily gathers in us. And when we cultivate gratitude, we become magnetic to more blessing.
6 - Water Your Relationships
Who have you been meaning to catch up with? Who have you lost touch with? Who do you appreciate more than you’ve communicated lately? Who do you need to apologize to or reconcile with?
Don’t put the unrealistic pressure on yourself to fully top off every relationship you care about before the end of the year. But at least send a text or write an email to let them know your heart. Then make plans to follow back up after the New Year.
7 - Get Quiet For a While
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that I’m a huge believer in the power of solitude, silence, and stillness for helping us to reconnect with God and with ourselves. Until we slow down, we don’t even realize how much the manic busyness of life has put us out of touch with who we really are. So, the end of the year is an excellent time to carve out some space to be alone with God for a while.
I think everyone should try to do a solitude retreat of some kind:
But even if you can’t get away for a couple of days, what can you do? Even just a few hours away from all the hurry and noise can be extremely curative.
8 - Start Now on One Habit or Goal
If it's important enough to be a resolution that you proclaim over the next 12-months of your life, it's worth starting right now rather than waiting.
Momentum and psychology are powerful forces on our resolutions. We all know that the vast majority of people sputter out on their resolutions by March (and we've probably been these people). You'll give yourself a fresh wind of confidence if you get a head start, and you’ll be less likely to fizzle out after the initial resolution adrenaline rush wears off.
Be realistic with yourself. Small steps that build over time are far better than doing too much too quickly and giving up. So spend 20 minutes in the gym, or 5 minutes in meditation, or run one lap around the block, or read one chapter.
9 - Name Your Next Season
For years in our church, it’s been a tradition for every person or family to choose one word to pray and believe for over the next year. It’s not some magical manifestation exercise, it’s simply a focal point for expectation and prayer. This past year, my wife and I chose the word “shalom.” Other years we chose words like “space” and “growth.”
The best part of this tradition is that you get to see, over the course of a year, how God meets you around the thing you’ve been praying for. He rarely delivers in exactly the way we expect him to, but it’s always good nonetheless.
So spend some time, maybe while you’re on retreat, to pray and contemplate what should be your “word” for the next year. Then, you can get creative in how you’ll keep that word in front of you so that you see it each day. Put a decal on your bathroom mirror, use Canva to create a new phone wallpaper that incorporates your word, or hang a frame of the word in artful script in your kitchen or office.
10 - Enjoy
Burnout doesn’t only come from working too hard or too long, it also comes from not pausing enough to celebrate and savor the good moments along the way.
It’s been a full year. Sure, it’s had its challenges and hardships. But there’s been victory, too. So before you charge the gates of the New Year and start climbing your next mountain, be sure to kick your feet up for a while and enjoy. There’s more work and new battles around the corner—you’ll store up the strength for those by resting and celebrating a bit now, in this transition season.
Make a lavish meal. Get the massage. Open a bottle of wine with your easiest friends. Laugh. You deserve it.
Thank you for reading!
If this post spoke to you or challenged you, send it to a friend or share it on social media:
To receive more posts like these and join the community, subscribe now:
Much love,
gb
When it comes to digital clearing I cannot overstate how much joy I get from unsubscribing from junk emails. Instead of just deleting them, take the extra 20 seconds to find the unsubscribe link and click through. If you do this for a few days you will notice a dramatic difference in the volume of nonsense email that makes it into your inbox. It's annoying in the moment, but it's a great way to reset for the upcoming year.