5 Steps To Help Reach Your Goals Using A Weekly Review – Pt. 1

I use a weekly review to ensure success with accomplishing my goals. And when I speak of goals I mean even moving toward those “things I’ve always wanted to do.” Those are typically quadrant 2 activities that are not urgent and therefore rarely get done. Trust me, my success is not based on talent, but instead by using a system and sticking to it. Additionally, I now have a hard time kidding myself, and that realism is a good tension to the optimism of the goal setting process.

The idea of weekly review is not unique to me, I’ve borrowed from David Allen and Michael Hyatt. I’m also used some of Steven Covey’s teaching that the rhythm of accomplishment is looking at your goals in weekly chunks as opposed to days, months etc.

So what’s my weekly review look like…..let me give it to you in 5 easy steps

1. Review Notes From Previous Week – Every Sunday evening I have programed in my calendar that at 8pm I sit down and do my weekly review. By then I’m starting to wind down from the weekend and am ready to to put my head into the week ahead. A critical tool to that review is my handy notebook…..let me explain.

As I go about my week I carry a black Moleskine notebook which I take notes in from every meeting or idea that I have during the week. I use a marking system that I also borrowed from Mike Hyatt that goes like this:

Square box – this means this task I am responsible to accomplish
Circle – someone else is responsible after a dash I write that persons name for followup
Asterisk for important and noteworthy points made in the meeting or that I was struck by during a meeting.

Many of you jot notes on Ipads, or your Iphone etc….and all of that works just great with my system. I just firmly believe note-taking in meetings is critical.

With my notebook in hand I start my review by looking back through my previous week to see how I’ve progressed on all those tasks. By now I should have them all put into projects, my to do list etc so this portion of the review is to catch any loose ends. Many times I find an important task that just somehow got lost in all the excitement…..I now plug that in to my week ahead.

2. Review Previous Week’s Tasks/Projects – I review what I had set to accomplish the previous week, what I did do and what now needs to moved into this upcoming week. There is always some tasks that must be reloaded, but usually this system gives me the satisfaction of being able to see how much moved forward last week. I then open my Gantt chart software and review the projects I’m working on to see where I’m at in each timeline and transfer the critical tasks to be performed to my weekly action sheet.

3. Meeting/Appointment Look Ahead – Actually looking at the the appointments/meetings for the week ahead. I open Google calendar to get my head around what kind of a week I’m going to be navigating. I always have certain times block for actual project work, I review what I have scheduled around those chunks of time so that I have a realistic look at what I have to work with.

Do you use weekly review? If so…what does yours look like?

Next post I’ll get to the critical action side of the review that gets things done.
Don