The Weekly Review is a popular productivity technique that helps us fine-tune and keep on top of our productivity system.
It’s a time dedicated to reviewing both short-term tasks and our long-term goals.
In today’s post, we’ll run through the concept of a Weekly Review and provide 6 simple steps to start your own Weekly Review practice.
What is a Weekly Review?
The Weekly Review is a concept I first read about in David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
Getting Things Done outlines an entire productivity system known as the GTD methodology. The Weekly Review is a core component of this system.
For those who adopt GTD, the Weekly Review is a time to:
- Gather and process all your stuff
- Review your system
- Update your lists
- Get clean, clear, current and complete
The Weekly Review helps you maintain your productivity system over time. This mainentance makes it more fun and rewarding to use!
The review is a critical success factor that aligns your day-to-day activities with your larger commitments.
What do I need for a Weekly Review?
As we mentioned above, the Weekly Review is an opportunity to stay on top of all your goals and projects. That’s why it’s pretty useful to have a system already set-up.
You don’t want to be brainstorming your goals and projects during your weekly review. Rather, you should be comparing your current progress against existing goals and projects.
The following will all be good to have before you start your weekly review:
- Calendar
- Goals list
- Projects list
- To Do list(s)
- “Waiting For” list
- Other relevant checklists
- Notes
Read more about creating a productivity system in our post on the GTD methodology.
The Weekly Review Process
The GTD Weekly Review involves checking in with each of the elements listed above. The idea is to use this time to fine-tune the productivity system that you use the rest of the time.
- Run through upcoming calendar events to identify upcoming events.
- Review your goals, projects and to-do lists to see how all your priorities are progressing.
- Read through any notes you’ve taken over the week and organise them into your system if necessary.
It helps to establish routines, habits and tools to support your weekly review. Otherwise it may be hard to ensure that you successfully adopt the practice. You want to make the process as fun and easy as possible. It should never feel like such a grand chore that you don’t actually get around to it!
Scheduling a weekly review into your calendar will also help you keep up the practice. I personally recommend Friday afternoons. That’s when the week is still fresh in our minds, but the weekly chaos has normally died down.
The Weekly Preview
Michael Hyatt offers a similar process to the Weekly Review in his book, Free to Focus, which he calls the Weekly Preview.
Whereas the GTD Weekly Review can be a vague process checking in with your system, Hyatt’s Weekly Previews come down to six clear and actionable steps.
6 Steps to a Weekly Preview
Completing your first Weekly Preview boils down to six steps.
- List your biggest wins of the previous week
- Review the previous week’s actions
- Review your lists & notes
- Check your goals, projects, events, meetings & deadlines
- Designate your weekly big 3 tasks
- Plan your rejuvenation
In the next section, we’ll dive into each part of the Weekly Preview in a bit more detail.
List your biggest wins of the previous week
The first step to a successful weekly review is reflecting on your big wins from the previous week. Too often, we focus only on our shortcomings and not on our achievements. The result is a drop in motivation and loss of confidence. This is a mindset problem.
Focusing on what we’ve done well is both motivating and helps us understand what success looks like to us. The most productive people lead themselves largely by the carrot, not the stick.
Review the previous week’s actions
After you’ve listed your biggest wins, take time to dive into your actions from the previous week. Take note of any clear lessons you’ve learned in the past week and consider any adjustments you can make to see more improvements.
The review can be boiled down to three questions:
1. How far did you progress with your most important tasks that week?
This first question helps us gauge our productivity success in the previous week, which sets us up for the next question. We’ll discuss setting important tasks later with the concept of the Weekly Big 3.
2. What worked and what didn’t?
This question helps us get to the root of the problem and focus more energy on our successful processes. What unplanned interruptions or distractions appeared? Could you have avoided them? Did you manage your time well? Take note of any strategies or tactics that went well and identify anything with your performance that was suboptimal. We can consciously focus on improving our weekly performance with these insights.
3. What will you keep, improve, start or stop doing based on these insights?
This question helps you develop actionable insights. Regular reflection with this method will help us develop clarity on what we need to change to improve.
Review your lists & notes
If your to-do list tends to grow like a weed throughout the week, this will be an important step for you. You can start by looking at everything currently on your to-do list. Are they all relevant and important tasks?
Managing Tasks
It’s worth noting that tasks can be managed with one of 4 actions. Go through each of your lists and apply these actions to each task.
- Eliminate – if a task is no longer relevant.
- Schedule – if you want to do it later, plan it in your calendar and batch it with similar tasks where possible.
- Prioritise – if the task is important but you’re not sure when you should do it.
- Defer – if it’s an important task, but you won’t have time in the next week.
When you work with a single to-do list and add everything to it, it easily becomes overwhelming. On the other hand, having many different to-do list makes it more difficult to stay on track of everything. The productive mind wants to see all its priority tasks in one place.
These characteristics are why I personally use the Bullet Journal for my daily to-do list. Each morning, I plan my tasks for the day before I start working. Check out my Top 5 Use Cases for Bullet Journal to learn more about this system.
Deferred & Delegated Task Lists
You may then want to move onto reviewing deferred tasks. Deferred just means that you weren’t working on the task over the past week but will at some point in the future. If that time is now, add it to your current to-do list. In this way, the weekly review helps us plan tasks into our current workflow.
Delegated tasks are another topic for review. If you’ve assigned a task to someone, this is an opportunity to check their progress and follow up with the person if necessary.
Organising Notes into your System
Once you’ve reviewed all your tasks and lists, have a look at your notes from the week. This might involve observations from meetings, ideas for the future and any other insights you’ve captured in the week.
You’ll want to try and organise any actionable insights into your lists. You may also have valuable information that isn’t actionable.
The Weekly Review is a great time to organise information in your system, whether a file management system or a digital notebook like Evernote or Notion.
Check your goals, projects, events, meetings & deadlines
One of the biggest reasons people don’t reach their most important goals is that they lose visibility over them. Daily work can easily feel chaotic, and it’s hard to think long-term when we’re just trying to balance the day’s tasks. The Weekly Preview helps us gain perspective, so we see beyond the day’s horizon.
Review your top goals and projects to identify the next steps to move them along. With this approach, you’ll achieve them eventually – no matter how lofty the goal.
Beyond achieving our grand goals, we can also keep on track of upcoming deadlines, events and meetings. Check your calendar for the next week to identify anything you may need to prepare, delegate or manage for the next week.
Designate your weekly Big 3 tasks
Once we’ve reviewed our big goals and looming deadlines, it’s time to plan our biggest tasks for the next week. We can think of the Big 3 as the most important things for us to do in the next week to progress towards our goals.
And I know some of you may be thinking…
But everything I need to do is important. How could I designate 3 tasks that are more important than everything else?
The truth is if you don’t prioritise your tasks, then you don’t have any priorities.
Productive minds love priorities. Here’s another application of the 80/20 rule: 20% of our actions result in 80% of the results.
When we can prioritise our top 3 tasks for the week, we’re more likely to complete them. After we’ve completed our priority tasks, we can feel free to spend the rest of our time however we might then see fit.
Once we have a sense of our big 3, it becomes easier to set up additional systems like planning an ideal week.
Prioritise tasks with the Eisenhower Matrix
At this point you’re probably thinking to yourself…
So priorities are important, but how am I supposed to prioritise my tasks?
That’s where the Eisenhower matrix comes in:
This matrix helps us divide all our tasks into 4 buckets ranked by urgency and importance.
The first quadrant is where we should start focusing our energy. These tasks are time-sensitive and have important outcomes.
The second quadrant is for tasks that are not urgent but still important. This is where we often need to refocus our time because it’s too easy for quadrant two tasks to get neglected and deferred!
The third quadrant contains tasks that are urgent but not important. Too often quadrant three tasks will take the top spot on our to-do lists.
Finally, we have tasks that are not urgent and not important. Why are these even on our to-do list? Unless we’re managing everything perfectly, we shouldn’t spend any time in this quadrant.
Even then, the only exception should be if we REALLY enjoy the task – like a sort of entertainment. Otherwise, we should avoid quadrant four at all costs!
Plan your rejuvenation
Once we’ve reviewed the week, organised our system and planned our upcoming tasks, it’s important to take time to plan our rejuvenation.
You can’t spend all your time working without end. Effective rejuvenation is an integral part of productivity after all!
Plan your rejuvenation and make time to:
- Sleep enough – which will make you more productive
- Eat well – eat healthy and enjoyable meals with meal prep
- Move – exercise the body to find new energy
- Connect – spend time with the people you love
- Play – do things for the sole reason of doing them
- Unplug – disconnect from your email and to-do lists
The best way to keep fresh and productive at work is to have a healthy work-life balance. I discuss this idea further in the post on optimal pandemic routines.
Make sure to focus on the above components each week for optimal productivity.
The Weekly Review in a Nutshell
Many productivity experts recommend implementing the Weekly Review as a productivity technique. Checking in with our system regularly helps us stay on track of current tasks and projects. It’s also a great opportunity to plan our long-term goals.
The Weekly Preview offers 6 clear and simple steps to checking in with our productivity system. Start by listing your biggest wins of the previous week to get you motivated and in the right headspace. Then review the previous week’s actions to see how you’ve managed in the last week to identify room for improvement.
Next, review all your lists and notes before moving onto your goals, projects, events meetings and deadlines. The goal here is to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Once you’ve reviewed all your tasks and upcoming tasks, it’s time to prioritise. Designate your top 3 tasks for the week, before planning your rejuvenation.
The Weekly Review is a great opportunity to stay on track of all our priorities, and it only takes six quick steps each week!
Before you go, here are 16 productive things you can do if you’re bored.
Boost your productivity with the Weekly Review and Mind & Practice today.