I’ve spent most of my working life building ways to get more done, so I’m in no position to be smug about what comes next. An annual life review is, in a way, a practice for noticing what all those systems leave out. That was the thought I carried into my conversation with Tiago Forte, whose new book, Life in Perspective, builds its whole method around that yearly look back.
Tiago and I both started out teaching people how to get more done. We’ve each spent the years since discovering that wasn’t the real question. Neither of us got there by throwing systems out. Frameworks foster freedom; they take friction out of the day. The trouble starts when the answer to every problem is more of the same: more measuring, more tools, more precision.
Attention Counts Minutes. Perspective Needs Space.
Tiago made a point about attention I haven’t been able to shake. We talk about it as if it were butter, something you buy by the pound, as though an hour at dawn with a good cup of coffee were the same as an hour at dinnertime with tired kids. It isn’t, and one person’s attention isn’t another’s either.
My own way of putting it is that attention mostly lives in time, while perspective lives in space: how things sit in relation to each other. That’s why Tiago’s idea of proportion works for me. When someone loses perspective, it often looks like chronic overwork crowding out family and health, and he treats that as a matter of angle, not character. You’re seeing it from the wrong place, and you can move.
The risk is that “proportion” tempts us toward a pie chart and a wheel of life, and suddenly we’re back to tinkering. This is where I think tolerance earns its place. A range tells you whether something is about right without pretending you can measure it. It’s also my worry about what comes next: if we really are entering a perspective era, someone will try to quantify it. In Productiveness, I argue something similar about the activity of producing versus the state of being productive.
When Optimizing Starts to Feel Hollow
Tiago described reaching goals he’d pushed toward for years and finding himself no happier, then discovering that his intellect and his systems had no bearing on what a relationship asks for: vulnerability, trust, openness. Those, he said, can’t be optimized by definition.
He doesn’t want to vilify systems thinking, and neither do I. The urge to improve is a noble one. What he notices is that people who lean that way tend to double down, with more analysis and more technology, and that we lack a built-in safety mechanism for when it goes too far. That’s the job he gives the annual life review. It’s a fair description of what a good reflective practice can do for anyone who builds frameworks, myself included.
Why an Annual Life Review Needs Grace
Here’s the part I wanted to press on. Efficiency has a way of turning into a moral measure: if you aren’t efficient, you must be a bad person. Review a year through that lens and the review becomes a report, a list of shortfalls, rather than a story.
Tiago’s answer is grace, and his version is plain. Even at your worst, you were doing your best with the information, tools, and resources you had. Without that, he said, a review is just self-flagellation. I don’t read that as making the practice softer in a way that costs it anything. An annual life review you can actually stay inside is worth more than one you dread.
Why the Present Is the Hardest Stretch to Look At
Tiago called the present the hardest stage of the review, and his reasons are practical. There’s less data outside of you to look at, so you have to go inward. And people who love systems and goals tend to be future-oriented, which works like a muscle: always projecting forward and hard to reverse. His claim that the true opposite of a future orientation is a present orientation stuck with me. I’d add that the past can pull us out of the present just as hard when we dwell in it. The most fleeting stretch of time turns out to be the hardest one to live inside.
The Smallest Thing Worth Writing Down
I asked Tiago what the smallest thing someone could record during the year would be, and his answer was what resonates. Seeds, he said, often show up years before the thing they become, and they rarely make sense at first. They don’t look optimal by any framework. He told me about watching a Broadway musical four times and weeping at the end every time without being able to say why. That’s resonance, and what struck me is that it’s acknowledgement over understanding. You don’t have to explain it. You only have to notice it.
I’m still working out what my own version looks like. I don’t start my year on January 1, and I journal most days to course correct rather than saving everything for one deep review the way Tiago does. Different rhythms, same question: how do you see your life clearly enough to choose what comes next? That question is what an annual life review is really asking, and I’d rather keep practicing with it than pretend it’s settled.
