[Annual Review Workbook] How was your 2024?


Hello Reader,

It's that time of year, when we look back at 2024 to remember our victories, learn lessons from our failures, and prepare for the year ahead.

"Look back to learn how to look forward." - Joe Girard

Every year, I look back by doing an Annual Review. This consists of answering these 4 questions:

  1. What went well last year?
  2. What could have gone better?
  3. What are the most important lessons I have learned?
  4. Who will I be next year?

For ten years I have published an Annual Review on my blog. This gives me a pulse to review my recent history, and remind myself of years gone by. I find the journaling and introspection of this exercise to be enormously helpful in grounding my experience of the year.

If you'd like an easy Google Doc workbook to journal your answers to these questions (with 4 journaling prompts per question), then you can use my Annual Review Workbook here:

AI Coaching Newsletter

Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.

Read more from AI Coaching Newsletter
chart, bar chart

💸 “The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use.” - Sam Altman Hello Reader, Last week I taught a half-day workshop in partnership with the Regional Business Partner Network at Enterprise North Canterbury. We gathered dozens of entrepreneurs and business owners together for an afternoon of AI training. They had heard the hype, seen the demos, and played around with a few tools. But they were still trying to understand how AI could...

🤖 "If you don't learn to how to orchestrate agents now, you'll spend 2027 catching up to people who started today.” - Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Hello Reader, Xero recently published a report comparing how New Zealanders are using AI. They surveyed more than 1000 professionals, and they found that most people are still using AI like a random toolbox. They open ChatGPT, or Copilot, or Claude, or Gemini. They ask a question, get an answer, copy the useful bits, and move on. That’s fine. A...

🕳️ “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to buy a quarter-inch hole.” - Theodore Levitt Hello Reader, Projects fail if they aim too wide. That was the central theme of last week's workshop in the AI Agent Accelerator, the 4-workshop sprint where we build, deploy, and fine-tune AI agents. Using my 4-step SAGE framework, every week we: SCOPE agentic projects AUTOMATE robotic work GENERATE skills and system prompts EVALUATE effectiveness Projects succeed and fail on their...