I’m incredibly proud to share news that’s been two years in the making: my next book is coming in Fall 2026!

It’s called Life in Perspective, and it represents the culmination of a reflective practice I’ve been refining since 2008: the annual review.

If you’ve read Building a Second Brain or The PARA Method, you know I’m passionate about systems that help us manage information and act on it. But I’ve come to realize we’ve been solving only half the equation.

We’ve gotten incredibly good at capturing information as it arrives. But we’re terrible at revisiting and making sense of what we’ve accumulated after time has passed.

That’s what annual reviews are for. And the timing has never been more critical.

Why this matters now

We’ve spent the last few decades in what I call the Attention Era—a unique period in history in which human attention became the scarcest resource, and thus the most valuable.

Every hour of every day has been transformed into a unit of consumption. Our attention is bought and sold by the second, fragmenting our mind into tiny pieces so that it can be monetized more efficiently.

But I believe we’re reaching the end of the Attention Era, because we’ve fully exploited that scarce resource. The average person now checks their phone 96 times per day—once every 10 minutes. There are simply no more pockets of attention left to harvest.

What’s scarce now isn’t what we notice, but how we make sense of it and put it in context. The new currency of our age is perspective, and we are entering what I call the Perspective Era.

Unlike attention, perspective cannot be harvested or extracted by outside forces. It can only be cultivated.

And the annual review is the most powerful tool I’ve ever found for doing so.

A life-and-death lesson on the power of perspective

Let me tell you how I discovered this practice, because it didn’t start with productivity optimization or goal-setting frameworks. It started with a gun pointed at my chest.

I was 23, studying abroad in Brazil and living in one of Rio’s favelas, where I taught English at a small nonprofit. I’d pulled out my camera to film my street when a man named Chucky – a local drug trafficker – pressed his assault rifle into my chest and accused me of being a police informant. He marched me up the hill to his headquarters while I tried to explain, in broken Portuguese, that I was just a volunteer teacher who’d been filming memories.

After what felt like an eternity, his leader let me go. But the encounter shattered something inside me. I couldn’t stop thinking: What am I doing with the time I have? Am I willing to continue following a path I haven’t chosen for myself, knowing it could all end at any moment?

A few weeks later, on New Year’s Day 2009, I sat on a Brazilian beach at dawn with a notebook. I had no idea what I was doing—I’d never read a self-help book or heard of SMART goals. I just knew I needed to see my life differently.

I started by listing everything I was grateful for from the past year. The first few items came slowly. Then the memories started flowing: teaching English to rowdy twelve-year-olds, dancing at Carnival until my feet ached, starting my first blog, the moment I realized I could make people laugh in Portuguese.

By the time I finished, I had pages full of specific, vivid memories. The picture they painted was of an unforgettable year I couldn’t help but feel proud of. As I set down my pen, I felt something shift physically inside me—the knot of existential terror that had been simmering there for weeks began to loosen.

When I turned to my goals for the new year, I suddenly saw them from a completely different perspective. I noticed something in what I’d written: I was happiest when traveling, teaching, and learning. That one insight – so small, yet so clear – made everything click into place for the next chapter of my life.

That was the moment the course of my life changed. Not because the obstacles had changed, but because I had.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just completed my first annual review.

The missing link in your knowledge system

Over the years, I’ve realized that the annual review (along with other reviews at other timescales such as quarterly, monthly, and weekly) is the fifth step in the CODE knowledge management cycle I’ve taught for years:

1. Capture: Getting information into your system
2. Organize: Structuring it for retrieval
3. Distill: Extracting the essence
4. Express: Creating value for ourselves and others
5. Review: Reactivating and reframing our accumulated knowledge

Without that final step, we’re like computers with infinite storage but no RAM. That is, we can remember everything, but can’t turn any of it into awareness or wisdom.

Think about how much happens in a single year of your life. Thousands of experiences. Hundreds of insights and lessons. Dozens of meaningful relationships and projects.

Without a systematic review process, 99% of that value is lost.

An annual review isn’t just reflection for reflection’s sake. It’s a memory technology—a way to compress a year’s worth of experiences into accessible insights, preserve important memories before they fade, reorient yourself in the arc of time, and build agency over your past so you can consciously shape your future.

And it compounds over time. Your third annual review is exponentially more valuable than your first because you’re pattern-matching across multiple years of consciously processed experience.

The ARC Method: A practical process that works

In Life in Perspective, I’ll guide you through the complete framework I’ve developed over 15+ years of practice and teaching this to over 1,000 students. I call it the ARC Method—three stages that correspond to past, present, and future:

Appreciate the Past: You’ll spend 1-2 hours gathering what was good about your year. Not in vague generalities (“I’m grateful for my family”), but in vivid, specific details that bring memories back to life. You’ll scroll through photos, review your calendar, collect artifacts—anything that helps you remember what actually happened versus what you think you remember.

Reflect on the Present: Next, you’ll spend 1-2 hours looking for patterns in what you’ve gathered. Which memories still move you? What themes keep appearing? This is when you notice the bodily sensations—the quickening breath, the tightness in your chest, the sense of expansion—that reveal what matters at a level deeper than the intellect. You’re not analyzing; you’re listening to your intuition.

Create the Future: Finally, you’ll spend 1-2 hours deciding what you want to create next. But unlike typical goal-setting that starts with what you should do, this emerges naturally from what you’ve discovered about who you truly are and what genuinely enlivens you. You’re not starting from scratch – you’re building on what already exists and what’s worked in the past.

This isn’t about perfectly following a rigid checklist. It’s a flexible toolkit you draw from based on your needs. Some years, you might spend most of your time on gratitude and excavating the past. In other years, you’ll focus on identifying patterns in the present. The process pulls you forward based on what captures your curiosity, rather than requiring you to force yourself through it.

What makes this different

If you’ve tried annual reviews before and found them draining or daunting, I understand why. Most approaches to structured reflection are built on assumptions that work against human nature.

The typical annual review asks you to analyze what went wrong, identify your failures, and rationally construct goals based on where you fell short. It’s an audit, not an exploration. A diagnosis of deficits, not a celebration of what has been and what’s possible.

The approach I’m taking in Life in Perspective contradicts that conventional approach in several fundamental ways:

It starts with what worked, not what didn’t. When you begin by looking for problems, you’ll find them…and miss the subtle patterns of what’s currently working well in your life. The most valuable insights don’t come from analyzing your failures; they come from noticing what makes you come alive and doubling down on that.

It trusts your body’s wisdom, not just your analytical mind. Your intellect can rationalize anything, but your body knows the truth. It is physical sensations that reveal what matters in the long term. Smart, achievement-oriented people especially need this, because we’re trained to override our intuition with analysis.

It treats annual reflection as a sacred ritual, not an optimization exercise. This should feel like hiking your favorite trail in deep conversation with your best friend, not suffering through a performance review with a tyrannical boss. When something is genuinely enjoyable, you don’t need willpower to sustain it. You can’t compete with someone who’s having fun, and there’s no reason this practice can’t be fun!

It anchors you in the natural rhythm of years, not the tyranny of daily habits. While productivity culture obsesses over morning routines and daily tracking, I’m more focused on how humans experience the long arc of time—through seasons, cycles, and the earth’s rotation around the sun. What happens annually guides and shapes what happens daily, and that reality has been underappreciated in most self-improvement literature.

My book will teach the specific principles and practices that make an annual review work, that make it feasible and sustainable, and that allow you to squeeze as much value as possible out of the practice.

Why I had to write this

I’ve been practicing annual reviews since 2008. Since 2019, I’ve published mine openly on my blog – among my most popular content. I’ve taught The Annual Review workshop every year since 2019 to over 1,000 students from around the world.

The results I’ve seen from doing so have been nothing short of remarkable, rivaling any other method or technique I’ve ever encountered. I’ve seen my students discover unprocessed grief they finally had the courage to face. They’ve committed to long-postponed dreams and signed their first clients within weeks. They’ve identified recurring patterns that needed deeper self-understanding, not just willpower.

But beyond the credentials, I know this works because completing an annual review remains the single most important project I undertake every year. The success of everything else hinges on the depth of honesty I’m able to reach in my reviews. They’ve become even more critical since becoming a father—my ability to be present and loving with my family depends on the overall balance I maintain across all areas of life.

Most importantly, even if there were no external benefits whatsoever, my reviews rank among the most fun and meaningful experiences of my life. They’re a priceless chance to appreciate what’s happened over the past year of my life, which is so easy to miss as the months blur together.

A technology for becoming

As AI handles more of our analytical and routine tasks, the value is shifting to what only we can do: make meaning from our unique experiences.

Your annual review becomes a deep well of accumulated wisdom that no AI can replicate. It’s your personal system for sense-making, fueled by the raw material of your life.

I call this building “temporal agency”—the ability to consciously shape your relationship with time, memory, and your personal evolution.

If you’ve ever felt like:

• You’re moving fast, but not sure you’re going in the right direction
• You keep making the same mistakes despite having all the “right” information
• Your Second Brain is full, but somehow not helping you grow
• You want to be more intentional about your life choices and priorities

This book is for you.

Annual reviews aren’t just another productivity technique. They’re a technology for becoming who you’re capable of becoming, by finally learning from who you’ve been.

​​It took a brush with death to wake me up and give me a new perspective on my life nearly 20 years ago. I still have that notebook from the Brazilian beach, its pages yellowed and curling, reminding me of time’s relentless passage.

But you don’t need a near-death experience to access that same transformation. You just need a few hours, a notebook, and the willingness to see yourself clearly.

I can’t wait to share this experience with you.