I’m on a roll with storied techniques for reviewing and reflecting on accomplishments and such at year’s end. The latest is a re-discovery of an old friend, John Caddell.
John created The Mistake Bank, a place for folks to tell stories about their 
mistakes and what they’d learned from them. He disbanded the site, a Ning site, when Ning started charging a fee for its sites.
Now he incorporates mistakes — but also assessments, gripes, and accomplishments — in a 5-minute journaling technique. He even created an app for this endeavor. In 5-minute journaling really helps at year-end review time:
This year, I have been writing a short journal entry at the end of every workday — a short paragraph explaining the most notable event of the day. I then answer a few questions about the entry. One question asks me to categorize the event, which could be a mistake, an assessment, a gripe… or an accomplishment. I built this as a cloud-based app (ugly, but functional), so I could enter the data from anywhere, including my phone.
The app enables him to filter his entries by topic:
I simply added a filter for “accomplishment” and got a fairly long list of accomplishments for the year. They easily clustered into a few most significant ones. I used this information as the basis to write my self-evaluation. There were patterns, too, in the accomplishments, that helped me do the document my strengths. The items labeled “mistakes” were useful to find development areas — an important and challenging part of a self-evaluation. Given that I had the journal entries, providing concrete examples was easy. I’m confident my self-eval will be the best representation possible of what I did all year.
“Providing concrete examples,” of course, translates into crafting stories.
John was so pleased with this technique that he declares,”I won’t do an evaluation ever again without having the online journal to work with.”
And, bonus, he’s offering to share his cloud-based app if you email him at inquiry (at) caddellinsightgroup.com.