During the Christmas season, the opportunity arises to reflect on the past year and consider: What have you actually achieved? Perhaps you can't remember everything anymore. An inventory helps you take stock of your progress! We will show you how a personal inventory works – and how the results turned out for the blink.it team.
The year is coming to an end, and we hope for a reflective Christmas season. Instead, for many, things are getting really stressful now: Personal and professional tasks must be completed, gifts searched for, and last projects finalized. Reflection often falls by the wayside.
Reflection, according to Duden, means “calm consideration” – and it is definitely worthwhile to take time to quietly think about the almost past year amidst all the stress. A personal inventory will help you!
We know inventories rationally from trade: At the end of the year, goods, cash balances, assets, and debts are recorded. Then a balance is drawn to see what went well and where mistakes may have crept in over the course of the year.
But not only in trade and large companies does it make sense to take stock at the end of the year; it is also relevant for service providers: What have I achieved? What happened – positive as well as negative? What have I learned and how have I changed?
5 Steps to a Personal Inventory
To take stock at the end of the year, the following five steps will help you conduct a personal inventory:
1. Take time: Deliberately plan time for your reflection. Make sure this time is really quiet and avoid interruptions from calls or emails. Experience shows that thirty minutes to an hour is sufficient.
2. Brainstorming: Take a sheet of paper – or another writing medium – and first write down everything that comes to your mind about the past year: What happened? What changed?
3. Month by month: Now, think about what specifically happened in each individual month. Just note down what has stuck in your mind: Important client meetings? Wonderful experiences with clients? Did you finish an important project or start a new one?
4. Complement memories: Now take a calendar. Specifically look again at each individual month and supplement your memories if necessary. You might be surprised by what you had forgotten!
5. Inventory in numbers (optional for number enthusiasts): As with a commercial inventory, you can enhance your annual balance with numbers and data that show you how productive you have been this year. Consider: Which numbers reflect my productivity and success?
Tip: Choose numbers that you can quickly find out or that you recorded throughout the year, such as “new clients,” “held training days,” or “number of emails in the 'sent' folder”! Such numbers also provide a good basis for an annual inventory!
Once you have completed these 4 or 5 steps, you will have a compact and structured overview of what you accomplished, experienced, and changed this year. From this, you can derive motivation, insights, and goals for the upcoming year!
Inventory in the blink.it Editorial Team
We in the editorial team at blink.it also see ourselves as a kind of service provider: We research and inform to reach even more educators with our enthusiasm for blended learning. Therefore, our editorial team conducted a personal inventory last week following exactly these steps.
Annual Review – Summarized as Best Of
January-March
Corinna joins the team as a new leading creative mind! The blog gets a facelift. “Blended Learning” becomes the new keyword for the entire editorial team – and the first version of the blended learning guide is ready for download.
April-June
After months of writing and design work, our rocket pack v2 finally appears! In addition, we are heavily engaged with concrete testimonials from experts like Dennis Tröger.
July-September
Many events such as fairs and barcamps bring fresh topics for the blog and fresh content for the new collection “Learning Materials and Guides.” We are also fully committed to video topics and releasing, for example, a comprehensive video guide.
October-December
Support comes to the editorial team again. We test our own product live as blended learning for onboarding. And everyone involved especially enjoys it!
Inventory Numbers That Inspire
85 blog posts
3 new websites
10 new cards for the rocket pack v2
4 new online courses
10 new guides, instructions, and more available for download
2 new full-time employees
Also, the entire blink.it team conducted an inventory together at the Christmas party! We are proud of how the whole team has developed throughout the year – and what we all achieved:
6 new employees across the entire team
10 new articles on our support page
14 events attended
including HR Innovation Roadshow, Zukunft Personal, and #CLC21827 rocket days held
30,000 new lines of code written for the app
19 major updates with new features released
The blink.it team: Working together and creating something new drives us! It’s good to reflect on all personal and collective successes at the end of the year.
Conclusion: An Inventory Provides New Motivation!
Whether individually or together as a team – an inventory is worthwhile not only for trade and large companies but also on a smaller scale. Some projects we had almost forgotten, and some numbers positively surprised us. Seeing all the results and experiences of the year at a glance definitely motivates for the coming year!
Now it’s your turn: We recommend that you take half an hour to conduct an inventory. You will surely be surprised by what you have achieved and experienced. This way, you’ll start the year 2019 with a boost of motivation!
PS: The blink.it editorial team will also take a reflective break next week. Therefore, you will only read something new in our blog on January 2, 2019. With that in mind: Happy holidays and a good slide into the new year!
