It is time for a personal retrospective, as the year 2012 comes to an end. I took some time on the train to plan my retrospective. 
So I’m sharing what I plan to do at the 2nd or 10th of January:
- Intro Music: Listen to my retrospective song, to start the retrospective ritual.
- Read Retrospective Letter: I write a letter to myself at the end of every longer retrospective. This time I’ll read the letters from 2011, Q1 2012 and the letter from the TWU retrospective.
- Social Interaction Analysis
- Queries: I’ll search in Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, Twitter, E-Mail, Call-Log for some interesting patterns. I will prepare some statistics before the retrospective. In this step I’ll analyse those data.
- Social MindMap: Integrate the insights gained from the queries into the a MindMap which should includes also the feedback I received directly from my peers.
- Timeline
- Enter Facts: Put the facts into a timeline to see the development over time. Data sources will be: Calendar, Heartbeat Retrospectives, other Retrospectives, Notes and my brain.
- Color the timeline: green for positive feelings, red for negative feelings and blue for surprises. Which each color, try to find out, why this made me feel this way.
- 5 Why’s: Select the three most important topics and ask why five times to find out the rood cause.
- Decide what to do
- Define goals: Define a limited set of main goals for next year.
- Define measures: Find way to archieve these goals. Select the ones which I want to pursue. Reject some as well.
- Select SMART-Objectives: For every measure find at least one SMART-Objectives so I can commit to it. The commitment itself happens in a heartbeat retrospective.
- Heartbeat Retrospectives
- Effectiveness: Think about, why heartbeat retrospective lost their effectiveness this year.
- Time: Think about, why heartbeat retrospectives were not so regular this year?
- Goal: Find means to make heartbeat retrospectives to support the goals I defined before.
- Plan: Create a new plan and form for the heartbeat retrospective.
- Write Retrospective Letter: Write a letter to yourself to be read before the next retrospective.
- Outro Music: Listen to the outro music to close the retrospective.
That’s the plan for now. What do you think? Do you have any questions?
I plan to do an article on every item of this plan in the first 6 month of the next year. So if you are interested, stay tuned.
