One thing to skyrocket your productivity 🚀

The Weekly Review!

Image courtesy @craftedbygc on Unsplash

It’s good to admit it first;

I was scared of this exercise or to say so — I am. But now I am handling it as one of 3 tasks of every Friday.

I have been looking into this weekly review method as a spectator from a far away — it is not easy to review your progress.

You will find endless excuses on each of undone task or a sense of guilt will catch hold of you. Either way you are in trouble so the best option is to find the best excuse to avoid this exercise.

That’s what I was doing.

Self realization is the best thing to happen and when I seriously looked at the area of self-improvement — this one is the most essential and effective method I could find.

The Weekly Review — TWR

Usually in the personal productivity space, we heard that there is no one solution fit to all and that is true most of the time, but if there can be ‘that one thing’ which can work for all or at least majority of us, That is:

The Weekly Review

What went wrong initially?

• I designed and explored variety of templates — downloaded few of them as well.
• Trying to use it with specific apps and longer duration. For example: Notion or Coda, 1 Hr of weekly review
• Planning too many things to accomplish in a week’s time.
• Almost entire Inbox was as my weekly to-do.
• Too much importance to design & workflow.

This whole experience was worth and has changed my thinking process. What I learned from my experience is that — Simplicity is the key

Now;

Plan well & Execute better with following 2 rule:

• Actual active project — 5 Nos. Max
• 3 Tasks per day — High priority, High leverage

The idea is to getting started and keep going.

Your Calendar & Your Task manager is sacred territory — Enter wisely.

I have a simple template in my things 3 — task manager and it only takes 15–20 minutes of Friday to look and review the week and can be done anywhere.

What do I review?

To make the process simple and to avoid procrastination, I have decided to include following in the weekly review:

1. Include Active projects only
2. Tasks review (Inbox) — A weekly collection of no-project specific tasks should go to Inbox
3. Tasks review (project and area specific)
4. Check Someday/Any day projects
5. Review Upcoming week tasks
6. Add or plan for next tasks — (Active projects/Inbox tasks)

How I do it?

To do this activity:

I have a simple template as a task with a check list of all the above 5 points:

[] Active project review — keep it as minimum as possible, 5 Max.

[] Review your Inbox

[] Update the next week tasks

[] Review upcoming tasks

[] Check Someday/Any day projects

This is a weekly recurring tasks on every Friday at 04:00 PM

This simple exercise has tremendous potential to make you more productive and you will also be able to:

• plan & prioritize well
• know your direction and speed
• be mindful and at peace with yourself

This is a DIY project, give it a try and you will enjoy the process and results.

Thank you for reading.

Keep reading, keep sharing.

Astu.

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