The turn of the year · fifteen questions · five days
New year journaling prompts, and why fifteen is enough
Most year-end reviews are written in one evening and read once. These are spread over the last five days of December — three questions a day, each day on a different subject, so the year gets looked at from more than one angle.
Why one evening is the wrong shape
An evening is one mood doing all the work. Sit down on the thirty-first and you are asking a single tired night to summarise three hundred and sixty-five days, from whatever chair you happen to be in and whatever happened that afternoon. What comes out is the review that evening allows — usually a list of things you failed at, written by someone who has not slept enough.
Memory does not hand over a year on request. What you can reach depends on the cues in front of you, and different days bring different ones: a Tuesday at the kitchen table, a Saturday with the radio on, the hour after a phone call. Write on five days and you get five layers of the same year. The year has not changed. What you can get hold of has.
Five is also the number this calendar is built on. Every solar term divides into three five-day periods, seventy-two of them across the year, and the product this page belongs to puts out a new card every five days. The shape here is not decoration.
The fifteen questions
One day at a time, in this order. The order is the point — day two is easier after day one, and day five is impossible without the four before it.
Day one · 27 December
What actually happened
Record, do not judge. Today is only for what happened.
- Name three days from this year you would keep if you could keep only three. What was in them?
- What did you do more often than you meant to? Not what you regret — what you repeated.
- Which month could you not describe if someone asked? What is missing from it?
Day two · 28 December
What it cost
Cost is the part most reviews leave out, and the part that explains the year.
- What took the most hours this year? Was that your decision or someone else's?
- What did you pay for and never use — a subscription, a course, a piece of equipment?
- Who did you say yes to when you wanted to say no, and how many times?
Day three · 29 December
What stopped
Endings are the hardest to date, which is why most reviews skip them.
- What did you stop doing this year without ever deciding to stop?
- What did you keep doing after it stopped being useful?
- What has ended that you have not yet admitted has ended?
Day four · 30 December
What you want more of
Not goals. Goals are promises. This is about what already worked.
- When were you most awake this year? What was happening in the hour before?
- What would you do every week if it cost nothing and nobody had to approve it?
- If next year were this one with a single thing doubled, what should be doubled?
Day five · 31 December
What you carry
The last day is for deciding what crosses the line with you.
- What do you know now that you did not know in January — about the world, or about yourself?
- What are you carrying into next year that you did not choose?
- Finish this sentence without using the word “try”: “By this time next year, I have stopped ___.”
Three rules that decide whether it works
One day at a time. Do not read ahead. Reading day five's questions on day one changes what you write on day one, and then day five has nothing left to say.
Particulars, not adjectives. “A better year” cannot be checked in March. “Walk to the station three mornings a week” can. If you cannot picture the thing happening on a named day, it is too vague to be useful.
Do not write resolutions. You have made them before and you know how that went. Write what happened instead. The promises are the part that has already broken; the record is the part you can work from.
When to start
Day one is 27 December, which puts the last three questions on the last evening of the year. Nothing here is timed to the sky: the solstice turns the light on the twenty-first, and the five days after Christmas are simply when most people have the hours. If you find this page in January, start tomorrow and take five days — the questions do not expire. If you keep the lunar new year instead, the five days before it do the same job in the same order.
If you want them to arrive on their own
Pentad sends one card a day and starts a new one every five days, with a box to write the answer in and the answers kept in your own browser. The first three days are free, there is no account, and nothing is charged unless you decide to keep it.
Journaling prompts, not advice. Nothing here is medical, and no claim is made about treating any condition. See method & limits.