A YearCompass alternative for the afternoon you never found
Twelve questions instead of sixty-two, and the page reads your answers back to you.
Free, no signup, nothing sent unless you ask. Below is the comparison in full, including the three rows YearCompass wins, because you came here to decide between two things and a table where one side wins everything is not a comparison. The sheet itself is one click away and your answers stay in your own browser.
The comparison
Every claim in the YearCompass column was checked on 28 August 2026 against the English A4 booklet and yearcompass.com, not against a summary of them.
| YearCompass | This page | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 20 pages, 62 write-in prompts. The booklet asks for "a few hours of uninterrupted focus". | 12 questions on one page. Around 40 minutes. |
| Scope | Two halves. Reviews the year that ended and plans the one starting. | Reviews the year that ended. Two of the twelve look forward, and neither asks for a goal. |
| Where you write | A PDF. Print it and use a pen, or type into the fillable version. | A web page. Exports to PDF, image, Markdown or plain text, and there is a blank sheet to print. |
| What happens after you write | Nothing. A booklet cannot read what is in it. | The page puts pairs of your answers side by side, lists every sentence you started with "I", and counts the words that turned up under three or more separate questions. |
| Languages | 61. | English. |
| Track record | Running since 2012. The project says more than a million people have used it. | Shipped in 2026. No user count, because there is no honest one to quote yet. |
| Price | Free. Direct download, no email address asked for. | Free. There is a paid AI interview afterwards at 9 EUR, optional, and the page works completely without it. |
| Privacy | The file is on your disk. Nobody else has a copy. | The answers are in your browser storage and the page makes no request of its own. Nothing goes to a server unless you press something that says it will. Clearing your browser clears them. |
| Licence | Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. You can copy and translate it, not sell it. | Not open licensed, and not restricted either. The twelve are free to read, answer and copy out by hand for yourself. |
Use YearCompass instead if
English is not the language you think in. YearCompass exists in 61 languages and this page exists in one. Writing honestly about your own year in a second language is a different and harder task, and there is no version of this where twelve English questions beat sixty-two in your own. That row is not close.
You want to plan the year ahead too. Half of the booklet is about the year starting: dreams, goals by life area, a word for the year. This page reviews the year that ended and stops there. If you want both halves in one sitting, the booklet is the one that does both halves.
You want to be away from a screen. A designed booklet, printed, with a pen, on a table, is a real advantage and this page does not have it. There is a blank sheet you can print from the sheet itself, and it is one sheet of questions, not twenty pages of layout.
What a booklet structurally cannot do
This is the honest form of the criticism, and it is not a criticism of the people who make it. Paper cannot read itself. However good the questions are, the artifact collects your answers and then sits there, and the most common thing anyone says about a finished YearCompass is a version of “I loved doing it and then never opened it again”.
It also cannot skip. A prompt that does not apply to your year is a blank box you look at for a while and feel slightly worse about, and a printed booklet has no way to notice and move on. And it cannot vary: the same sixty-two prompts arrive in the same order every December, which is exactly why people who have done it three or four years running go looking for something else. That is not a bug they failed to fix. A booklet is a fixed sequence of prompts, and being fixed is what it is.
What this page does about the first of those, and only the first, is rearrange. When you have written enough, it puts two of your answers side by side, pulls out every sentence you began with “I”, and counts the words that turned up under three or more separate questions. It adds no sentence of its own to any of that. There is no model on the page, and a page with no model behind it has not earned an opinion about you.
What the twelve actually ask
They measure the year against the person who started it. January-you against December-you: what you thought the year was going to be about, what it turned out to be about, and what the gap cost. Every one of them is answerable only at the end of a year, which is the difference between a year review and a set of reflection prompts with a date on them.
Four sections, twelve questions, and two of the twelve look forward. Neither of those two asks for a goal, a word for the year, or a list of dreams by life area, which is where most of the booklet’s second half goes.
Written from scratch, for the licensing reason in the FAQ below and because sixty-two questions cut down to twelve would still be sixty-two questions’ worth of shape. Nothing is sent unless you ask for it: what you type is written to your own browser and stays there.
Questions people ask
What is YearCompass?
A free 20-page booklet that helps you review the year that ended and plan the next one, made by a volunteer team in Budapest and given away in 61 languages since 2012. You download the PDF, print it, and fill it in with a pen. It is the default in this category and it deserves to be.
Why would I want an alternative?
Almost always length. The booklet asks for a few hours in its own opening pages, and the reason people give for abandoning it is that they never found the afternoon. The other common one is repetition: the questions are the same every year by design, so the third or fourth time through, you can predict your own answers before you write them. Neither of those is a flaw in the booklet. They are what a booklet is.
Is this made by the YearCompass team?
No. No affiliation of any kind. This is a separate tool by a separate company, and nothing here is derived from their booklet.
Can I use the YearCompass questions in this tool?
Not through us. YearCompass is licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0, which permits non-commercial use and requires derivatives to carry the same licence. Fatement charges for part of what it does, so reusing their prompts here is outside that grant. Every question on this site is original for that reason. You can of course fill in their booklet yourself, for free, forever.
Which one should I use?
Use YearCompass if you want to plan the coming year as well as review the last one, if you would rather work on paper away from a screen, or if English is not the language you think in. Use this if the afternoon is what has stopped you before, if you have done a long year-end workbook two or three times and it has gone flat, or if you want something to read your answers back to you rather than just collect them.
Do I need an account?
No. No account, no email field, no signup of any kind. The page makes no network request of its own, and what you write stays in your own browser unless you press something that says it is sending it.
Is there a printable version?
Yes. The sheet has a blank download that prints the twelve questions with room to write under each one, so you can do this with a pen the way you would do the booklet.
One thing neither of them does
Neither the booklet nor this page asks you a second question. Both hand you a fixed list, and whatever you write, the next prompt was already decided before you arrived. That is the ceiling on the whole format, and it is the reason Fatement exists at all.
The interview reads what you actually wrote and asks the follow-up. Around nine questions, about twenty minutes, one at a time, and it does not agree with you. It is free to run. Detailed artifacts built from the transcript are 9 EUR, once, no account and no subscription, and if they do not land, write to us and you get the 9 EUR back.