This week we’re talking about our weeks and how we can get more out of them with a weekly review. The idea behind a weekly review is to look back on how things went and use that to help us figure out how we want our next week to go.
In this episode, we’re going to go over the benefits of performing a weekly review, look at some of the ways to make doing it easier, and then get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually perform it.
Let’s get started by talking about what a weekly review is and what the point is, because I feel like that’s an idea that comes up a lot with planning - what is the point of planning if I have ADHD?
But we’ll get to that, first, what is a weekly review, reset, preview - whatever you want to call it.
And all of those names work pretty well for what we’re looking to get done here, although I’m a bit partial to reset because I like the idea of clearing out my systems to get ready for the next week. And that’s really what we’re trying to do with the weekly review, we’re looking back at the past week so that we can get ready for next week. We’ll get into all that entails in a little bit, but what we’re trying to do is figure out we did, what worked, what didn’t work and then how we can apply that to what we’re doing next week.
I know that sounds like a lot, but we only have to do what is going to work for us. One of the biggest keys for us in doing a weekly review is keeping it as short and simple as works for us. So your weekly review may end being shorter than what I do or it could be a little more involved.
I’ve already touched on why we want to do the weekly review by describing it’s function. By looking back at the past week it helps give us a picture of how we’re doing and that can be incredibly helpful for us looking into the next week. It can be hard to see where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been and specifically where you’re at right now.
The weekly review helps give us clarity into what going on in your life as well as helping us keep track of our future planning.
Now just as importantly as to what the weekly review is, it is also important to understand what it isn’t. And namely that means it is not a time to beat ourselves up over what we haven’t done. When we’re looking back it is incredibly easy to slip into self-judgement and get down on ourselves over all those things we were supposed to do but just didn’t.
Trust me when I tell you that no one gets through everything on their todo list. We all are always going to have more to do. And let me tell you we all have things on our todo list that have been on there waaaay to long that we’ve never gotten around to doing. Important things. I know I sure have a lot of things that I’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t executed on. In fact, I have an appointment on my list that I missed 3 years ago and have yet to reschedule - you know what, as some accountability I’m going to get that scheduled before I release this episode cause I do really need to get that checked up on. <did I do this?>
But yes, we all have those things we know we ought to do but for whatever don’t follow through on and it’s really important that we’re not using this review to beat ourselves about them. The review is a time for us to figure out what we’re doing next based on what has already happened and that’s not going to work well if we’re focused on the wrong things.
This means our review is also not about overplanning ourselves into doing nothing - when we’re looking back we’re looking at what worked and what didn’t. If we overplanned last week, well, we can file that away for next week as one of those things that didn’t work.
We’re just looking to create some guidelines for our future self to help us do all those things that we want to do but have a bit of trouble remembering that we want to.
This sounds all well and good but it can feel incredibly overwhelming to sit down to do a weekly review and realize we don’t know where to start. I’ve definitely been there, where I know it’s a good idea, but have no idea what to do when I sit down to do it. Even when I have an idea where to start it can feel overwhelming, so my first suggestion here is that we help ease ourselves into it.
This means that we want to really carve out time to do this. Now, the amount of time you are going to need is going to depend a lot on how much you want to do. When we’re starting out simpler is better - and that means we probably don’t need as much time, so let’s shoot for something around 15 minutes. And when you’re scheduling this be sure to add a bit more time on your calendar to help yourself transition in and out, so you may want to schedule for more around 30 minutes.
What will also be helpful here is working with a timer to help keep you on track - I like to use visual pie timers like the Time Timer.
And to be sure, we want to treat this with the importance of any other work task we might have do, so really do put it in your calendar. You might also want to create a playlist of songs to listen to while you do your review. Anything that’ll help you get into the groove of doing this thing and that’ll help cue you into focusing on this. The more we treat this like a real task the better we’ll be on following through - and the real advantage of planning comes when we can work on doing it consistently - which I do know sounds fairly intimidating with ADHD. If we treat this like something that we’ll just get to when we have the time, well, then we’re just not going to get to it.
This also brings up the question of when should we be doing our weekly review? But the answer is really up to you, personally I like doing mine on Friday afternoons before my kids are home from school. For me, I know that my weekends tend to be too much in the air to follow through on getting my review done then. But really whenever works for you is going to be best - maybe you can dedicate a bit of time Sunday afternoon. That would be great. Maybe you want to start your Monday morning with the review of last week and getting clear on next week. Also perfect. Or maybe the only time you have is on Wednesday and you want to do the reset then so you can finish your week off strong - also works.
The point is building the time into your day so that you can actually follow through with your intentions of doing this review.
Another thing that can be helpful for getting going is doing a quick declutter and clearing off your desk. And declutter is a great way to frame our weekly review - we’re pulling ideas and moving things around. We’re decluttering our brain and getting ourselves into the right space to start off the next week strong.
Now before we jump into the how to section I’d also like to stress that we’re not trying to take a lot of time here for this process. We want to make things quick and easy as we can, so while we could really go into some of the questions and ideas here, we don’t need to. If something isn’t jiving with you, feel free to skip it. Remember this is your review so do it in a way that’ll keep you engaged with it.
One of the ways I like to start my weekly review is with a quick 5 minute brain dump about my ideas from the week. Just getting down whatever is up in my head and taking up space so that I can focus on the review.
With our brain dump out of the way we can start reflecting on how our week went. If you need to it can be helpful to glance over our calendar from last week to jog our memory of what was going on, but remember we’re not looking ahead yet, we’ll get to that in a little bit.
Questions we can ask ourselves during this are things like, what were my wins from this week (and remember they don’t have to be big wins, just any wins from the week)? What was working well? What wasn’t working?
A couple of keys here are again that we want to stay out of judgement here and get curious. Instead of I didn’t mow the lawn because I was lazy, what was really going on? Did you over schedule yourself? We’re you just out of energy? Did you not give yourself enough time to get it done? And this is important because when we sit with explanations like “I was just lazy” we’re not giving ourselves anything to work with. The solution to being lazy is to just not be lazy - but I can create real solutions if I need to make more time on schedule to complete the task, or if I need to build some accountability in to help with follow through.
Now with our reflection complete we can get to our main decluttering at that’s going to start in our inboxes. So this can be email, text messages, slack channels - anywhere that you build up these messages that need to get taken care of. This can even be something like the pictures on your phone - I know I take a lot of pictures on my phone through out the week as little reminders of things and sometimes… okay, most of the time, I forget to check back on those pictures so having a real time to go check through them is great.
Now we can pull our calendars back out - if there was anything from the last couple of weeks that didn’t get taken care of and is still relevant can be moved and then we can can start looking ahead. And since this is a weekly review we only need to look ahead 1-2 weeks.
What are the things that are coming up that we need to prepare for? Are there things out of your normal routine coming up that you are going to need extra reminders about?
I have an appointment at the bank this week and I know that unless I really remind myself about it I’m going to forget. And it’s not just it’s appointment that is important for me to remember about, but also that I can’t do anything else during that time slot.
Often when I’m just trying to mentally rehearse my week I tend to either fudge my time estimates or I mentally double book tasks. So while normally I would have my Wednesday afternoon’s free, with that appointment in the way I have to shuffle around any tasks that normally I’d mentally go “oh yeah, I can just do that during that free time I usually have on Wednesday” - the point of doing the review and making sure I’m looking at these things is so that I am mentally getting these things on my radar. Sure, I’m still going to wind up with things where I go, Oh I’ll just do that tomorrow, and then when tomorrow comes go “oh no!” but this can help reduce the frequency of such mishaps.
And we can use all these checks to build our plan for the upcoming week. We’re looking back at our email and calendars to build that todo list and figuring out when we can work these things in. We’re looking at what worked and what didn’t so we can change things up where we need to.
The review can be a force multiplier by giving us clarity on what is coming up and how we want to approach it. And remember to have some fun with it and take it easy. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good and do what works for you.
This Episode’s Top Tips
The point of a weekly review is for us to not only look back at what happened last week, but use that knowledge to help us plan out how we’re going to approach our next week. It allows us to gain clarity over what we’ve done and what we want to do.
When we’re performing our weekly review it is important to keep ourselves out of judgement - we’re not trying to beat ourselves up over anything we didn’t get to, we’re just looking to make next week better.
One of the most important things for making sure we complete our weekly review is to actually build in the time to perform it on our schedule. By building in and protecting our time to perform a weekly review we are far more likely to follow through on our intentions.