The Silliest Season: Why We Love a Good Year in Review, from Spotify Wrapped to the music mashups
I’ve got Dibs on the first post for your “Wrapped” for 2025. Read, bookmark, and revisit so that you have a Wrapped 2025 that brings you joy
First of all, Happy new year! I leave you with an end-of-year reflection I’ve had this past week.
People often call the summer (lack of) news the Silly Season. It’s that time when nothing happens, but since the news still has to roll on, reporters resort to interviewing beachgoers about their opinions on, well, the beach, or covering whatever party the local town is throwing.
For me, the time around Christmas and New Year feels like my personal silly season. It’s a chance to pause, relax, and get ready for another work year. Why? Because the fiscal year begins in January. But honestly, the “new year” feels more like a social construct to me, January 1 doesn’t magically solve any of my problems… or yours. Still, if it helps people refocus and get back on track, I think that’s great.
Last thing before we start: If you’re one of the 40+ readers that subscribed this newsletter in December thanks to ‘s The Curious Detour and his viral note, you’re very welcome here!
I hope you enjoy reading this post and don’t forget that we have an archive of actionable and engaging content, a bit of a curiousity-sparked detour to get you started with more, where I bring you weekly insights on setting up best practices to work better with more innovative ways and your own ideas to get you advanced in your career or legacy!
The Summer silly season and its winter Counterpart (or an Intro to this reflection about retrospectives, both works)
As the year winds down, I’ve been reflecting on how we spend so much of it like hamsters on a wheel. We’re constantly chasing big deliverables, putting in the work now so we can enjoy life later. And then, at the very end, we pause to look back and see what we’ve done.
This is the time of year when everyone seems to join the reflection bandwagon. Every publication is putting out some kind of “Year in Review,” while people on LinkedIn are sharing AI-generated badges from a new startup’s “LinkedIn Review Creator” without considering any privacy on how the data was collected. Some don’t even realize they’re signing up for the startup’s newsletter; others probably do and just don’t care.
Whatever tool you used will celebrate how much you used it, but it might also bring out how much time you might have wasted on it. To me, Reddit comparing my scrolling of 2024 to 17764 bananas just… made me feel awful for even using Reddit (and I don’t even use that much! I go months without Reddit!)
The funny thing is, this whole season of looking back, whether it’s through a Spotify Wrapped, a LinkedIn badge, or any other retrospective, makes me realize that we’re not really celebrating these moments as they happen. We’re too busy to notice. Instead, we let them pass by and only take stock when the year’s about to close. I don’t mean to be a Grinch against your celebrations before the end of the year, but I feel that we could all use a bit more of celebration before we hit that year milestone!
And maybe that’s why we enjoy this “winter silly season” and it feels so important. It’s not just about looking back, but rather about giving ourselves permission to stop running and actually acknowledge everything we’ve accomplished, even if it’s only in hindsight.
Cue my own Carrie Bradshaw moment: And I couldn’t help but wonder… why are we like this?
Take this post, bookmark it, save it, so that you can revisit it often throughout 2025. Let this be the reminder and actionable post to help you plan and track your goals, milestones, whether you’re using it for the professional goals you set at work or the personal ones.
This is also an Innovation from Within update on scheduling times for 2025.
Why Are Year-in-Review Features So Satisfying?
As a teenager, I was obsessed with Pop Danthology: those mashups of the year’s biggest hits by some random DJ. It was pure joy, a nostalgic recap of the songs that defined the past year. Here’s one of them… do you remember this?
I think we love Year in Reviews because we get to relive moments where we might’ve been happy. Or we feel seen. Or we feel our work has mattered enough to be a number. And we love dashboards!
It’s easy not to see the value of our things until we see it in perspective. Apple created through iCloud the “Year in Review” for myself, and once I added more pictures, I could see how many places I’ve seen, how many happy and frowning moments I had (I seem to have a personal photographer that catches those moments when I’m extremely expressive with my forehead), and things I did, whether it was riding a bike, visiting 2 windmills, flying to Italy, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Netherlands, Belgium, handpainting tiles… twice. I even made pasta and bread and dumplings by hand, I did a lot of video calls, I rode my bike, I ate new foods, I went to more than a dozen concerts, so it was a good year: and I almost had forgotten I had done so many of these things!
And I recon that with these “wrapped” we’re having a hindsight and confirmation bias on what we accomplished only by what the apps and algorithms choose to show, instead of the things we did. Did you remember how many times you donated to charity, or helped somebody even if it meant going out of your way, or how many times you put the cart or the tray back, even if it wasn’t mandatory, or when picked up something from the floor to keep the streets clean and safe for the blind people who might pass? No, these things don’t get counted nor celebrated. It’s a bit of a consumerist perspective on your year, only to the providers’ delight. Spotify Wrapped is probably the biggest advertising moment of Spotify, only for us all to do it for free, and potentially, generating millions of revenue by having people commit to paying it for another year. Before I digress too much, the point of this post is to inspire you to take notice regularly and before the end of the year. So…
What Makes a Good Year in Review?
This question hit me when I started putting together a Year in Review for my team. We’d worked on apps, automations, and designs for other departments, and I thought it would be a fun way to showcase our wins to other stakeholders at work and to celebrate the team’s efforts. Plus, it gave me something productive to do during that post-Christmas, pre-New Year period when half the team is on holiday.
What started as a fun project quickly became a scavenger hunt. With 12-14 people and a long list of accomplishments, I realized memory alone wasn’t going to cut it. Thankfully, I had organized and led 10 of the last 12 monthly insights meetings, and had created some slides with each month’s highlights, and we had online polls about the feelings of the team, but still there were gaps.
That’s when I had my “aha” moment: for 2025, I won’t make the same mistake, because making a good Year in Review starts long before December.
Think about Spotify Wrapped. It doesn’t magically come together in October/November. They plan ahead. They know what data to track and how to organize it so by the time December rolls around, they can present something slick and meaningful. Inspired by this, I’ve already started setting up my 2025 Year in Review, with monthly systems to capture the highlights.
Setting the Stage for a Meaningful Review
If you want a professional Year in Review in 2025 that truly resonates, start now.
This brought me back to a course I took during COVID called Data Visualization for Business. One of the key lessons was this: before you can create shiny, good-looking dashboards, you need to know what data you’re looking for and how you’re going to collect it. A dashboard is only as good as the story behind it, and you can’t tell a good story without the right pieces in place.
If you want to feel that you've accomplished things worth reminding yourself in 365 days, you need to know what they will be, right? Think about what matters to you or your team, and set up a system to capture those moments. It could be as simple as a monthly check-in or jotting down wins in a shared doc.
How to Prepare for a Meaningful Year in Review
This doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s about creating small habits throughout the year so, when December rolls around, your review practically writes itself.
1. Decide What Story You Want to Tell
What matters to you? This will guide what you track.
For Work: Think about team or project milestones you want to highlight.
For Personal Life: Focus on achievements, habits, or experiences that bring you joy. Before you go full Rambo, start small. I always compare beginning new things with juggling plastic and glass balls. Before you go for many goals, make sure you can juggle the plastic balls first. Once you can do it with the rest of your life (work, family, duties, etc.), you can add a new one to the mix. And it’s better to let a plastic glass fall, than a glass one!
Ask yourself: If I could only pick 3, 5 or 7 things to celebrate next December, what would they be?
2. Make Tracking a Habit (Without Overcomplicating)
Tracking as you go is the key. Here’s how to keep it simple:
Set up a monthly “win” log:
Use a shared doc at work to track team accomplishments.
For personal goals, keep a note on your phone or a folder for photos of moments that mattered.
Use tools you already have:
Calendars can remind you of major events.
E-mail yourself every month with the things you enjoyed, did for the first time, and successfully created/did that are aligned with the goals you had. Ideally, attach a few pictures, and add some of the things you did.
Slack or Teams channels are great for quick “win” updates.
For personal milestones, even your Instagram feed can help jog your memory.
3. At work, use a Framework That Works for You
Listen, I dislike using or teaching people about frameworks, because it’s yet another thing you have to learn. But in Product Management it’s quite common to talk about things like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), and they can keep things clear and focused.
What are OKRs?
They were created by Andy Grove at Intel and later popularized by Google. Essentially, you set an Objective (a goal) and a few Key Results (measurable outcomes that track progress).
For example:
• Objective: Strengthen team collaboration.
• Key Results:
• Hold 10 cross-department workshops.
• Launch an internal feedback survey by Q3.
• Host a team offsite by year-end.
Why use them?
OKRs work because they’re simple and measurable. They keep you focused on what matters and naturally create milestones worth celebrating.
4. Celebrate as You Go
Don’t wait for December to pat yourself on the back. Celebrating small wins throughout the year makes the process more enjoyable and meaningful.
At Work:
Acknowledge achievements during team meetings or via quick shoutouts on Slack.
Host quarterly reflections to look at progress.
E-mail yourself with a monthly and quarterly review, so that you can keep tabs on it and it’s easier to get it once you get your performance review or end of the year review.
At Home:
Create small rituals to mark personal milestones.
A dinner out, a journal entry, or even a photo can make a moment feel special!
I saw a girl on social media buy several champagne bottles for herself and her boyfriend and for which one, they wrote their “goals” and once it was achieved, they’d pop the bottle open! That’s a great way to celebrate!
At some point, they got their own house and they opened the bottle! Isn’t that a great way to visualize your goals and celebrate achieving them?
I believe the original post is from this blog. But I saw it here some months ago.
5. Reflect Quarterly
Quarterly check-ins prevent everything from piling up at the end of the year. They also help you course-correct if needed.
For Work:
Review your OKRs. Are you on track? Do they need adjustment?
Look back at what you’ve logged in your monthly “win” folder.
For Personal Life:
Take 15 minutes to ask: What made me proud this quarter? What could I do better next quarter?
Use your birthday as your own New Year. Use that energy to give you a boost to set up goals for yourself, and celebrate the year you had!
Why This Matters
Whether it’s for work or life, a good Year in Review helps you notice the moments that matter and keeps you from letting those wins blur into the background.
And it’s not about over-intellectualizing or obsessing over metrics.
There’s a young woman in Canada that even keeps a tab on how often she goes to the bathroom, tracks how many liters of water she drinks a day, what she eats, how many hours she sleeps, what and when she goes out, and many other things that while it’s important to know it,… over-doing it might actually turn it into a thing you don’t get to enjoy.
I mean, she herself calls it unhinged! But I liked her way of doing things (I don’t track half of it, but I got to see all her notion templates as they were being published, before she started monetizing it, and I really see that it works for her and it can help a lot of other people too!)
I’d say that it’s more important to focus on creating a system that lets you pause, celebrate, and appreciate the story you’re building.
And hey, even if your “dashboard” ends up being nothing more than a mental recap, the process of noticing and recording those moments will be worth it. So start now. By next December, you’ll have something meaningful to look back on.
I’m not the only one writing about actionable ways to keep track on your data: for tech engineers and devs,
mentions a brag document for yourself, which you can read more about, here. You should read this even if you’re not a dev or in tech, because it is quite easy to understand! and have also at some point briefly discussed part of this topic of keeping tabs on your growth and milestones as well. If you want to grow professionally, both of these publications have great insights for you!
Innovation from Within 2025 Quarter 1 - Changes
As we head into 2025, there’ll be some changes to Innovation from Within. Until end of March, posts will arrive in your inbox once a week, every Sunday at 17:00 CET. These Sunday posts will focus on “Pop Culture Innovation,” allowing me to dive deeper into the overlap of creativity, trends, and innovation.
After talking with a few Innovation from Within readers, I’ve decided that this shift to one post a week will allow me to write more research-backed, insightful and interesting posts, as I reduce my content-creation schedule from ca. 24 posts to 12 posts from January to March 2025. It gives me the space to focus on deeper, more thoughtful content while also navigating my new role leading Innovation efforts for Digital Products at work.
This shift feels like a win-win. It means I can dedicate more time to researching and refining the ideas I share with you, and it also gives me room to grow in my own work, growth that will ultimately reflect in the stories and insights I bring to this space.
Thank you for being part of this growing community of Innovators, and here’s to a more intentional and innovative 2025. See you next Sunday at 17:00 CET!
One more thing: Time Tracking
I’ll start tracking and sharing how many hours each post takes to research and write. Why? To keep myself motivated and to see if there’s a correlation between the effort I put in and how much you enjoy the posts. If you like this post or feel like replying, you can reply directly to the e-mail. I love hearing or reading your insights, as they help me create better content for you!
For example: this post took me 9.5 hours to research and write, plus a couple of “falling asleep but still thinking about it” moments that I didn’t track but definitely contributed! So 9.5h for a 12 minute reading post shows that sometimes you have a lot of things to say and condensing it into a readable chunk is the difficult part!
I first had this idea of showing the time to write when I was doing my Klaus series, with its 3 posts, and it took me 36h to research, take notes, think about, draft my thoughts, and complete into three published posts.
A big thank you Francisca for the highlight of Empathy Elevated. I am excited to continue reading Innovation from Within through the new year on Sundays.
From a work point of view I have to track progress April-March and it's such a chore, it feels less like a celebration of achievement than just extra work about work.
Making some kind of personal dashboard to track "non-work" things, like writing, sounds interesting though, yes more work but I am interested to see how long it takes me to write a post and if long posts or short posts perform better etc.
Something to think about, I definitely love a good spreadsheet!