Review
I have meetup-tinted glasses, I'll admit. That being said, I think reviewing your year is good for achieving more of your goals, this is a solid structure for encouraging people to do a thing that's good for their goals, and the writeup is therefore pretty good to have in the world. When I imagine a small community of people trying to make better decisions, I think they run this or something kind of like this once a year or so. This is an easy-to-run writeup of how to do something that groups around the world do.
I'll vote this should be in the Best Of LessWrong Review. It's not groundbreaking, sure, but c'mon- it works even if your "meetup" is one person in size, just yourself. That's a rationality technique right there.
I'd love to see followup work on which variations people feel helps them, and better yet a bit of data on whether (as fits my intuitions) people who do this achieve more of their goals than people who don't. That's outside the scope of the one post though. Wish I'd thought to ask about this on the unofficial LW census, that's totally the kind of input I'd like to check for.
Summary: Three rounds of questions, where the meetup thinks about their past year in a few frames of reference, then discusses their insights.
Tags: Small, Medium, One-Off, Experiment
Purpose: Year in Review is something more useful than New Year's Resolutions - more like a team retrospective you might do at work, but personal. Taking a chance to take stock.
Materials: Have enough paper, pens, and tables or clipboards for everyone to have their own, and enough space for all or most to sit with their paper out of other's direct sight. Smartphones and laptops are also possible but assume they won't be around. Take time to consider the lists of questions ahead of time; you may want to vary them. Have a pomodoro timer which can track 10 minutes and 20 minutes.
A whiteboard or other big wall-hung paper where you can write the questions in everyone's view is not necessary but very helpful. A shared Google doc with the questions is a good substitute or addition.
Announcement: We'll spend some time looking at our past year and asking questions of ourselves. What did you mean your priorities to be, last year, and what did it look like they were? What did you start doing, and stop doing, and do you endorse those choices? If you were to 80/20 the year, what was the 20% and what was the 80%? Then we'll talk some about our answers and any questions they raise.
Description: Describe the format to the participants:
Check for understanding and that everyone has whatever writing tools they need, then read the first set of three questions. If you have somewhere to write these questions in common view, do that now - in my case I wrote abbreviated versions of the questions[1], since it's a reminder more than a description. Pause before starting the timer, in case anyone's confused what they mean; after any necessary clarifications, start the timer for 10m. Be fairly strict about this timer unless everyone wants more time (very unlikely).
When that goes off, open up discussion - in my experience this doesn't need to be guided much. If the conversation goes too far afield, gently prod it back on-topic, and if it's too quiet initially or before 20m have passed, you can prompt with specific questions from the three people have been contemplating. But this shouldn't be an issue in most cases.
As usual with discussions, be fairly lax about this timer[2] - if the conversation is going along animatedly and staying basically on-topic, let it ride. The one problem that may crop up is if a minority of the group is being left out, or something similar. In this case it's best to cut it short and move on.
Once the discussion is done, repeat with the next set of questions, reading, writing, and clarifying as before.
Once you have finished three sets of questions, if there's still plenty of time before the meetup should/must end, let discussion roam freely.
Questions:
Variations: For some questions, it's worth suggesting that participants save their answers and store them to consider next year, to see how well their predictions or intentions played out in practice.
The questions used have not been iterated much; they worked well, but may not be ideal. Here's a previous draft of questions, in four sets rather than three, to consider if you want to switch it up. (If you do, please comment with the questions you used and how well they were received!)
If you have time for a longer unstructured discussion later in the meetup, consider using a final 'live question' - not taking time to write it down, but talking and thinking it over in real time out loud. I recommend the last one from that draft:
This particular question is also a particularly good one to suggest writing down for next year.
Notes: Thanks to Roger Curley and Maia Werbos, whose Meetup Cookbook provided the seed of this idea, and Elena Churilov, whose own review process provided the 'curiosity' question and inspired the rest of 'Set D'.
e.g. "If someone looked at your actions for the last year, what would they think your priorities were?" I wrote as "Year's apparent revealed priorities?"
In fact, if you have a separate timer that's subtler than your normal one, like a quiet chime instead of a loud bell, you might want to use that one to set the 20 minutes for discussion.