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When it comes to your work day, do you sometimes feel more like a firefighter putting out all of the fires and crises and emergencies that pop up during your day?
Well, in today's video we're gonna be talking about a weekly review, and how we can prevent these types of emergencies just by taking a little bit of time out of our week to not only plan ahead, but also look behind to make sure that we haven't forgotten anything.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And I honestly believe that the weekly review is the most important meeting that you will have all week.
Now you may have heard of a weekly review before. It was popularized in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, however, David Allen's weekly review included 11 things on a checklist, and I think 11 things sounds like overkill.
It's too many things. So today I wanna give you an easy four-part checklist so you can have a very effective weekly review.
And you know what? I wanna remind you that if you're not the only one participating in this, it's simply not a weekly review. I think you deserve as little as 30 minutes a week just for yourself so you can set yourself up for success.
Mind Dump
So let's take a look at the checklist.
First off, you're gonna want to reserve a minimum of 30 minutes each week for your weekly review.
Now you can reserve a little bit of extra time if you'd like, but I think you can have a very effective weekly review in as little as 30 minutes.
Now at the end of today's video I'm gonna answer some frequently asked questions including when you should hold your weekly review, but let's dive into the checklist itself.
The very first thing I suggest is that you start with a five minute mind dump.
Now if you're not familiar with that term mind dump, sometimes it's referred to as a mind sweep or just think of it as a brainstorming session.
But this is your opportunity to get all of those ideas, all of those concerns, and all of those thoughts out of your head.
So you can either take out a blank piece of paper. You can use a whiteboard or a chalkboard, or you can take out your favorite note taking app, such as Google Keep or perhaps Evernote, and just write down all the things that are on your mind right now.
Now I suggest that you use a timer as a part of this process, because you might end up spending a lot more time than five minutes, in fact you might spend the entire 30 minutes just dumping everything out, but set a timer for about five minutes, and in most cases, the most urgent or the most pressing items will be the first things that come to mind.
You wanna make sure that you capture those ideas so that you can have a clear head as you go through the rest of the process.
Calendar Review
Now the next step I recommend you engage with is reviewing your calendar for the past week.
Now, what I do as a part of my review is that I will open up my calendar and literally take my mouse cursor and hover over top of every single event or appointment that I've had in the past week, and this is just a very brief mental jog of all of the things that I've been engaged with.
I'll hover over something and say, okay, I met with Lucy and we talked about that project. I met with the team and we talked about this.
But you know what? The real value in this is that without fail, there's at least one thing that I come across and I'll say to myself, you know what? I've forgotten to follow up with so and so about this item.
Or, you know what, I promised so and so that I would give them a call back 48 hours after the meeting.
This allows me to not forget those things in the past, but now I can do something about them.
I can add them to my to do list or I can add them to my project management tool, and in some cases I can do them as a part of my weekly review if it's something very, very quick, otherwise I'll add it to the appropriate area and do it later in the day.
But this often takes as little as two minutes just to review my last seven days or perhaps my last five business days just to make sure I have not forgotten anything in the past.
Future Review
After we're done looking in the past we wanna look into the future, and I recommend that you review your calendar for the next coming two weeks.
Now you can review further than just the next 14 days, but I recommend two weeks at a bare minimum.
This gives you enough time so that you can prevent those surprises and prevent walking into the office or opening up your laptop and saying, oh my goodness, was that today or is that meeting happening this morning?
That's exactly what you don't want happening next week or even tomorrow.
So as a part of your weekly review, just like we did in step two, we wanna take that cursor or just take your finger and just do a mental jog of every single commitment or meeting or event that you have on your calendar, make sure that you can prepare in advance.
Do you need to send a reminder to others about an upcoming meeting?
Do you need to prepare some travel time for perhaps a meeting or location that you're not familiar with?
Do you need to rearrange a meeting because you've double-booked yourself sometime in the next two weeks?
This relieves me of so much stress as I take again just a few minutes to look ahead and make sure I can either clear my calendar or adjust my calendar appropriately.
Now the last and final step in the weekly review checklist is to open up your project management tool or maybe you have some other place where you keep track of all of your goals, and you want to review all of the deadlines and all of your key commitments.
This is an opportunity not to actually do things or to get the work done, but just to review the status of everything within those projects.
Do you need to negotiate a new deadline depending on where you're at with that project or how other projects are going to affect your work?
Do you need to give people a status update of where things are at?
Whatever you need to do, this is an ideal time to get that high level view of all of your projects and key commitments.
When
Alright, so now some of the common questions that come up with a weekly review, I would say one of the most frequently asked questions I receive is when is the best time to perform a weekly review?
Which is the best day of the week and what's the best time of day?
Now, I typically recommend starting out and doing your weekly review on a Friday morning.
Not just because that's when I do my weekly review but for most of us, Friday is the last day of the work week, it's our last day before the weekend, and on top of that, we wanna do it early enough so that if we come across something that is urgent or that is very, very important, we've still given ourselves enough time to do something about it before the weekend, or before others leave work for the weekend as well.
It also makes it nice and clean when you're reviewing your calendar for the last week, you're basically just looking from Monday through Friday.
You're doing a mental jog of something that's still fairly recent. You're not going so far back in time or over a hump like a weekend. You can go back and review and remember what was going on in those meetings and events.
Now when it comes to looking forward, another nice thing of having your weekly review on a Friday is it sets you up fresh for Monday morning, and I know a lot of us sort of struggle with Monday morning and what's going on. We're thrown back into the whirlwind.
Well, the nice thing about doing your weekly review on Friday, you can set yourself up for a great start, and no surprises, remember, you're gonna look ahead at both Monday and Tuesday, see if there's anything really significant or big and scary, and make adjustments or plan ahead accordingly.
Now of course you can pick any day or time of the week that works best for you.
In fact, I'd love to hear from you if you're already performing a weekly review, when do you perform it? When do you schedule it into your calendar? And do you actually add it as a real event?
That would be my last tip for you is make sure you actually include this on your calendar.
If you don't add it, if you don't give it the priority it deserves, it simply won't happen.
So I wish you all the best as you perform your weekly review.
