TJL #1: How to conduct a weekly review

Hi friends,

Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #1. In this newsletter I share a new lesson every day, so stay tuned. Today Jan learned how to conduct a weekly review.

What is a weekly review?

A weekly review is a recurring appointment with yourself:

• to groom your tasks and agenda;

• to reflect on the past week;

• and to plan the next week

I came across this idea of a weekly review in the book Grip, which is a book about how to organise yourself and work more effectively.

This morning (it is Sunday at the time of writing this) from 8-10am, I found the time to do a weekly review with myself and found it really useful. I found a lot of peace and calm with this weekly review, so that’s why I’m sharing it.

How to conduct a weekly review?

A prerequisite to conduct a weekly review well is having a well-kept agenda. This is what my agenda looks like. I try to keep it as up to date as possible with both personal and professional appointments.

The benefits of having a well-kept agenda is that you can quickly see what you did (and didn’t) do.

Step 1: Look back

The first step in the weekly review is to… review what happened. This is where you well-kept agenda is going to come in handy. You can quickly see what you did do and what you didn’t do.

For every appointment in your agenda (for me that is each purple block) go through the following questions:

• Did I make notes of this meeting? If yes, are there any actionable tasks associated with these notes? Add these to your task list.

• Is there a next meeting planned based on this one? If yes, to plan this?

• Did I finish all my planned in work of this week? If yes, have I proactively notified people that are waiting for the completion of my work?

When that is done, I also like to use the weekly review to reflect the week on a more personal level. What were the highlights of this week? What were the lowlights? Did significant things happen this week? I use the following questions to guide myself in this reflection:

• What were your biggest wins this week?

• What were your biggest failures this week?

• Did you manage to complete your priorities for this week? If you didn’t, what happened?

• What is the most important lesson that you learned this week? How are you going to use that lesson next week?

  

I collect these notes in Roam, but you can use anything really. A simple Google Docs is also fine.

After having reviewed your agenda for this week, your will have a task list of things todo and a list of highlights and lowlights.

Step 2: Process your inboxes

Of course, your agenda is not your only source of information. You have a lot more inboxes. Go through and process all these inboxes:

• Work email

• Private email

• Mailbox and other physical inboxes (tickets, letters, etc.)

• Tasks in your notebook

• Software (Roam for me) that you use to make notes

• Any other inbox that you might think of

Collect all these tasks and put them in a single place. For me that is Todoist and my physical notebook, but again you can use anything. The important part here is that you make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

When you’ve done that and collected all the scattered tasks into a single place (for me that is my Todoist inbox) go over all your active projects and check the following things:

• Go over all the tasks for each projects. Do I have vague tasks? Make them concrete and actionable.

• Are the tasks that are still open relevant? Remove the ones that aren’t.

• Are there projects that I have to add? Have I finished projects recently and can they be removed from the active projects list?

• Run through your “someday” list. Are there projects you want to tackle next week?

At the end of this step you have a single unified task list organised in projects that you know is complete and covers all bases. Awesome.

Step 3: Plan next week

The third and final step is to plan the next week. After reviewing, you have a clear idea of what happened last week and what tasks you still have to do. You also have a much clearer idea of what is important. Now it is up to you how to define what next week is going to look like:

• Plan your week. Make sure to schedule in work that is line with your responsibilities and your goals.

• Balance urgent and important. Make sure to schedule important and non-urgent work first.

• Less is more. Plan conservatively. It’s better to plan less and achieve it, than to plan too much and fall off the bandwagon.

Keep these things in mind while planning:

• Plan your week with work based on your priorities

• Are your meetings next week been confirmed by all parties?

• Did you plan enough prep (before the meeting) and process (after the meeting) time for every meeting?

• Are you missing information for meetings?

• Can you cancel some meetings and free up time?

At the end of this step, your next week will be planned with meaningful work.

Now what?

I challenge you to do a weekly review. Set aside 1-2 hours and a cup of coffee and go over your week. Challenge yourself.

Personally, I found a lot of peace of mind in this weekly review because it forced me to really think my week through. What did I do? What didn’t I do? What was I planning to do? What happened? Is what I did this week in line with my short-term and long-term goals? What fun stuff happened? What did I learn this week that I will carry into next week?

Anyway, that’s it! Today Jan Learned how to conduct a weekly review.

Thank you for much for reading. See you next time!