Taking Stock of 2024

More questions for an end-of-year stocktake for yourself, family, community, workplace or gathering.

Hello friends,

We are nearly at the end of the year if you can believe it.

I’ve spoken before about the annual stock-take that I do in December and January to work out whether my present course needs adjusting. It’s the main journalling event of my year. Most years, I don’t even journal. I just put it into dot-points in my Notes app. I love looking back at my annual stock-takes. With the personal stock-take I’ve been doing for a decade now, I look at my life broadly or holistically (work, family life, health) but for sharing, I produced two versions for you to print at home and if you like, give away as a card.

You could put the cards into colourful envelopes at a family gathering or a work/community function.

Feel free to download them. Keep reading for printing instructions. And perhaps you’d consider subscribing while you are at it?

Here’s the work-life version:

And Forget-Me-Not is for family and friends:

Print-at-home Instructions:

A4 paper

Page orientation: portrait

Double-sided: (on SHORT EDGE)

Scale to fit: (print entire image) 97%

Layout: 2 pages per sheet

B&W is fine

Print and fold into half and half again

Note about question language:

When I asked my dad to look over some of the questions given he has 96 years of perspective (was a journalist, author and newspaper editor and still writes every week), he took out words like ‘happy’, when, for example, I had asked “What made you happy?” He preferred “What were your ‘highs and lows?”

I have opted to use ‘happy’ based on Brené Brown’s definition from Atlas of the Heart:

I would define the state of happiness as feeling pleasure often related to the immediate environment or current circumstances

But I’ve also used ‘content’ as in ‘contentment’ because some people feel happy is either over-used or incorrectly-used. Brené defines contentment as:

A feeling of completeness, appreciation and ‘enoughness’ that we experience when our needs are satisfied

Thanks:

Thanks to

Peter Billingham

for the card design inspiration.

Thanks Dad, for help with the wording.

Thanks

Prof Paul Dolan

for the original idea from our interview and his book Happiness By Design

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Speaking of Pete Billingham, I enjoyed our chat on the art of the eulogy this week in Forget Me Not, my monthly series on memorialising hosted by

Barbara at Projectkin

. If you missed the conversation, you can listen again right here:

If you missed the conversation, you can catch it again here:

Thanks so much and see you next week!