How to Build a Year-in-Review Dashboard for Your Hobbies

Every December, the internet fills up with year-in-review posts. Spotify Wrapped. Letterboxd year in review. Goodreads reading challenge. They're fun to look at and even more fun to share.

But each one only covers a single thing. And you're stuck with whatever stats the platform decides to show you.

What if you had your own?

A year-in-review that covers everything you care about. Books you read. Movies you watched. Games you played. Albums you listened to. Board games, wine tastings, whatever your thing is. All in one place, showing exactly the stats you want to see.

Not limited to what Spotify thinks is interesting. Not missing context because Goodreads doesn't track the things you care about. Your data, your way.

The trick is starting in January, not December

You look at your year-in-review in December. But the data you put in during January is what makes it worth looking at.

You need data from the whole year for the summary to mean anything. The good news: if your tracking system is simple enough, it takes about 30 seconds per entry. Finish a book, open the spreadsheet, add a row. That's it.

The people who get the best year-end summaries aren't the ones who do a big tracking session in December. They're the ones who spent 30 seconds at a time, all year long.

What to track for each hobby

You don't need 20 columns. For most hobbies, the basics are enough:

• Title or name – the thing itself
• Date finished – when you completed it (or the date you logged it)
• Rating – your personal score, 1-5 or 1-10
• A few domain-specific fields – pages for books, episodes for TV, hours for games, grape variety for wine

The analytics come from the accumulation of these simple entries over 12 months. You don't need to track everything. You need to track consistently.

My setup

I use SheetFlux trackers for this. Each one is a Google Sheet with a built-in Dashboard and Insights page that shows yearly stats. What my December looks like:

I open my ReadFlux spreadsheet. The Dashboard already shows: 42 books read, average rating 3.8, most-read genre was science fiction, I read the most in July and I'm 5 books ahead of my annual goal. I didn't build any of that. It was there the whole time, updating with each entry.

Same for WatchFlux (movies and TV), PlayFlux (video games), ListenFlux (music), BoardFlux (board games), and TasteFlux (wine and drinks). Each one has its own dashboard that's been building my year-in-review all year long.

What makes a good year-in-review dashboard

After a few years of doing this, I've found six things that make the summary worth looking at:

1. Totals and counts – how many books, movies, games. The headline number.
2. Ratings distribution – what percentage were 4+ stars? Did you have good taste this year or did you sit through a lot of mediocre stuff?
3. Genre or category breakdown – what did you gravitate toward? Maybe you thought you were a thriller person but your data says 60% literary fiction.
4. Monthly activity pattern – when were you most active? Summer reading slump? Holiday gaming binge? The monthly chart always tells a story.
5. Highlights – best-rated, longest, first and last of the year. These are the conversation starters.
6. Goal tracking – did you hit your target? How close did you get? When did you cross it?

If your tracker shows all 6, you have a complete year-in-review without doing any extra work in December.

The SelectedYear filter

This is the feature that makes the whole thing work long-term. Each SheetFlux tracker has a year selector in Settings. Set it to 2025, and the Dashboard and Insights pages show only 2025 data. Set it to 2024, and you see 2024.

Your year-in-review doesn't expire. Three years from now, you can flip back to 2026 and see exactly what you read, watched and played. You can compare years: "I read 42 books in 2026 and only 28 in 2025 – what changed?"

That kind of comparison is impossible with Spotify Wrapped. Once January hits, your 2025 Wrapped is gone. With a spreadsheet, your data is yours permanently.

You don't have to start in January

Starting mid-year is fine. Starting in October is fine. You won't have a full 12 months of data, but you'll have something. And next year, you'll have everything from day one.

I'd suggest this approach if you're starting late:

• Start logging now – every new book, movie, or game from today forward
• Backfill what you remember – go through your Kindle history, Netflix watch history, Steam library. You'll recover more than you think.
• Don't stress about completeness – a partial year still shows patterns. 8 months of data is better than zero.

By December, you'll have a year-in-review that's actually yours. Not algorithmically generated. Not limited to one platform. A real picture of how you spent your time on the things you care about.