Hey friends,
One of the staples of productivity is doing a Weekly Review. It involves taking a bit of time to look back on your week, reflect on how things went, close relevant open loops and generally combat the natural entropy of life.
I discovered the concept (in David Allen’s Getting Things Done) way back in 2018. But because I’m a total wasteman, I’ve only actually done the Weekly Review a handful of times in the past 2 years.
With that backdrop in mind, somehow each Saturday for the past 3 weeks, I’ve spontaneously had the thought ‘I should do my weekly review’. And more importantly, I’ve then actually done it.
Here’s my simple method.
- List the dates from the past week.
- For each date, I look through (a) my calendar, and (b) my Daily Note on Roam.
- I note down the salient things that happened on the day. It might be projects or tasks I finished, people I talked to, books that I read - basically anything that I think ‘oh yeah that’s important’.
- As I’m doing this, I’ll think of other related that I need to do / delegate, and so I add those to my todo list.
That’s it. It’s simple, doesn’t take too long, and gives me a birds-eye view of my whole week. It lets me remember what the most important parts of the week were, and lets me open any new loops that I need to, or close existing ones.
Every time I do this, I get to the end and think ‘damn, I’m really glad I did this’.
The next step would be to build some sort of reflective practise into my Weekly Review. The real ‘productivity pros’ also use their Weekly Review to clear out their inboxes, convert everything into tasks, organise those into projects etc etc etc. But because for me, it’s enough of a struggle to do the basics, I’m deliberately keeping it simple for now.
As the Weekly Review becomes part of my life (like writing these emails), I’ll be able to add more complexity and rigour to it. But for now, just doing it is the most important thing.
If you haven’t tried it out, have a quick Google of ‘how to do a weekly review’. Everyone’s got different views on the topic, so find what resonates with you and do it. You’ll be very glad that you did.
Have a great week!
Ali