7-Day Productivity Plan: Day Five

Estimated reading time: 4 mins, 34 secs

QUICK-WIN: Schedule a 30-minute block of time in your calendar this Sunday to plan your upcoming week (do this now). You can use this time to review your tasks and plan when you're going to work on upcoming goals. The weekly review is an essential part of this productivity system and you'll find you really enjoy taking the time once a week to reflect and plan.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe” – Abraham Lincoln

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By now you should have noticed some big improvements to your productivity. I hope you can see how easy it is – simply by having a clear goal, listing everything you need to do to reach that goal and then planning time to work on the goal you can make massive progress.

Today we're going to look at one of the steps you need to take to maintain this system, the “weekly review”.

What is a “weekly review”?

Simply put, the weekly review is when you take some time once a week to reflect on what you’ve achieved over the previous week, take stock of your current situation and plan for the upcoming week. It doesn't’ have to be a massive process and by investing just a small amount of time on a Sunday afternoon to plan your week you’ll be amazed at how well this sets you up for success the following week.

How to conduct a weekly review

1) Fill out your weekly journal (5-minutes)

To kick off your weekly review, spend 5-minutes filling out a weekly journal. I have a note inside Evernote which I add to on a weekly basis. Answer these two simple questions:

What were my major achievements this week?
What challenges do I currently face?

Don’t worry about writing big detailed paragraphs. I use bullet points and aim for a minimum of three per question. The key is to keep this whole process simple. If I write in a nice and concise manner I’m much more likely to go back and reread these points later.

By using your weekly review to celebrate what you’ve achieved over the last week, you can bring a greater sense of fulfillment and personal accomplishment into your life. This helps bring real meaning to your work as you remind yourself of how what you’re doing contributes to a higher purpose.

2) Review your task list (10-minutes)

Now you can flick over to your task list and take stock of what you’ve got coming up over the following week. During this step, you might want to adjust any of the due dates and reorder tasks as you plan the new week.

During this step, you can add any extra tasks you can think of that need to be addressed. Go through your weekly journal, any notebooks, sticky notes or scraps of paper you use to capture ideas and get this all into your task list. You should also review the “Waiting” and “Next Actions” sections on your task list for anything that can be addressed the following week.

The goal of this step is to “prune” your task list by removing anything that no longer needs to be on there, adding new tasks, editing existing tasks and getting all your tasks into the right projects, sections and tags.

3) Review and update your calendar (10-minutes)

Take a look at your calendar and review your upcoming week. Spend a few minutes making sure there are no conflicts. When planning your time, don't worry about necessarily filling out the entire week. Get the major tasks into your calendar and plan at least 2 to 3 days ahead. You'll naturally add more tasks to your calendar as work comes up later.

Refer back to your task list and schedule blocks of time to tackle the major things on this list. Anything that’s going to take 30-minutes or more should be scheduled on your calendar. A good way to identify these tasks is to use time-based tags to group tasks by the amount of time they’ll take (refer to my email on day 3).

I like to tackle my most important and(or) challenging tasks first thing in the morning. That way, if urgent work comes up later I can rest a little easier knowing my most important work has been dealt with.

4) Review everything (5-minutes)

Spend a few minutes reviewing everything and check to see if there's anything you've missed. Make sure all tasks and appointments line up and check you're allocating enough time for different bits of work.

Mistakes to avoid

Skipping the weekly review. You might be thinking that it's okay to skip the weekly review. From experience, I can safely say that the weeks where I've been the most productive are the ones that have been well planned in advance. Conducting a weekly review actually helps you to destress as you get everything well organised and planned out. Don't skip it!
Over-committing. You probably remember me saying this before, but it really is crucial. Don't try and squeeze too much into your week. I remember weeks where I've planned all this stuff I'm going to do, only to have to push half of it back to the following week. Whenever I've done this, I've felt like the week was a failure (even though I got some good work done). It's far more motivating to do a quality job on a few really important tasks and then sneak in some bonus stuff at the end of the week if you have some spare time.

Action step: Prepare for your weekly review

This coming Sunday, go through the steps above to conduct your weekly review. In the meantime, make sure you've scheduled time for this review in your calendar. Have a think about what you'd like to use for keeping a journal. It can be anything – a notebook, an app like Evernote or a journaling app like DayOne.

Get a good nights sleep tonight because tomorrow we're going to look at some tips for maximising your energy!

Talk soon,
Paul