Around December, people often pause and take stock of how their year has gone. While I enjoy the insights that can come from a annual review, I have been practicing reviewing my life at a weekly frequency. This frequency has changed over the years which I can go into in a different post. The aim of this post is to share an overview of how I do a weekly review
The materials:
My inputs to the review are
- daily journal
- a text file on my smart phone where I dump random ideas and thoughts
- exports from various apps on my smart phone
The sections:
Values
My values at the moment are: mastery, gratitude, kindness and curiosity. I’ll review my week and make notes on whether I converged towards or diverged away from these values.
Learnings
This is a dump of all my notes of various sources I have consumed during the week (e.g. books, blogs, podcasts). This gets consolidated in a different process which I can expand on in a different post.
Considerations
These are ideas that have come up during the week that I am not quite sure how to use. Usually, when I read over them, I can refine them and perhaps find ways to convert them into an experiment to try during the week or as an action item. If that’s not possible, it may get discarded or may get transferred to the monthly review to be aggragated with other considerations from the month
Concerns
These are challenges that I am feeling apprehensive or anxious about. The idea is that once they are out of your head and onto the page, they lose their power. I also push myself to find an upside in the challenge. For example, at the time of writing, I am anxious about getting some teeth extracted with only local anesthetic. I am attempting to meet this challenge by emphasising the opportunity to practice mindfulness and control where my focus goes before, during and after
Takeaways
This is divided into four sections
Lite tasks
These are tasks that have come up that I think I can do in 2 minutes or less. As a result, it is probably more efficient to just do them now rather than add them to my backlog
Schedule
These are tasks that I think will require more than 2 minutes. During the review, I will triage them into my backlog
File
These are ideas that are not actionable straight away. Most of these get consolidated into my second brain for later use
Experiments
These are ideas that I might like to try out in the week ahead. E.g. try doing meditation after my workouts and seeing its effect on between workout recovery time
If it sounds like these sections are not solidly defined, that’s because they are not. I don’t hold the format is not set and I am on the look out for ways to optimise the process and the format
After these sections have been filled in, I will harvest the review for any insights or actions that I can implement in the week ahead.
Aggregation
I’ll repeat every week. Every month, I’ll aggregate the reviews that have been done that month and look for any themes or arcs using a similar structure above.
Pair this review method with the practice of creating an idea pile so that you have a place to catch your ideas when inspiration strikes.