A couple of years ago I was at a point in my retirement where the “permanent fun vacation” (finally freed from work!) period was over, and I was feeling bored, unproductive, and unfulfilled. I fortunately encountered material written by David Sparks (aka MacSparky) on how to do a life roles inventory and evaluation.
I took a personal retreat and identified my life roles, evaluated them, and wrote a description of what, I thought, would be the best version of myself in each role. Furthermore, I identified what I was good at, and what kind of work made me feel productive and fulfilled, and decided what kind of work I wanted to do.
For more details about the process I went through see my post on How a Roles-Based Productivity System Brought Clarity and Purpose to my Life in Retirement. I also wrote My Experiences and Tips for Doing a Roles-Based Personal Retreat.
For the first year and a half, I did 6-month reviews and weekly reviews. I’ve now replaced the 6-month reviews with quarterly reviews. It’s important to understand that my system of reviews is based on the foundation of my life roles. You don’t have to use life roles as the basis for quarterly and annual reviews, but that’s how I do it.
The source of most of the questions I ask in my weekly and quarterly reviews also comes from David Sparks. He talks about how to do quarterly/mid-year reviews in this article, and how to do weekly reviews in this article. Although I’ve made my own modifications, the heart of my review system is based on Sparks’ work.
In this post, I intend to discuss three aspects of reviews. First, why do reviews? Second, what is the content of my reviews? And Third, what are the practical aspects of doing reviews?
1. Why Do Quarterly and Weekly Reviews?
I find that doing quarterly and weekly reviews has two important results: 1) It helps me to live an intentional life, and 2) It helps me to live a more balanced life.
I’m the kind of person who wants to live an intentional life. I don’t want to just be reacting to life as it happens. I want to decide what’s significant to me, then do those things.
Basing my system on my life roles ensures that I’ll consider all the areas of my life, not just my professional work. I’m not just a writer and teacher; I’m also a husband, a father, a friend, a hobbyist, and other roles.
Doing regular reviews helps me to:
• Stay on track doing what’s important to me. Reviews remind me regularly what I’ve decided is significant for me to do, what my projects are, and what my ideals are.
• Remind me of all my life roles. Most of the time when we think of productivity, we think of our work. Being periodically reminded of all my roles helps me to have a more holistic view of my life, and helps to remind me that my “work” is much broader than just writing and doing presentations.
• Schedule my work, so the important things get done. As a part of my weekly review process, I time-block on my calendar when I’ll be working on projects and tasks I’ve selected as important to me. That makes it much more likely I’ll actually do the work.
• Balance my life by thinking about all roles and making adjustments. When I remind myself about my many roles, it helps me to realize when I’m ignoring certain roles, and helps me to bring more balance to my whole life. When life gets busy, I tend to forget about some of the roles that I have. When I’m spending a lot of time focusing on researching and writing, I forget about the importance of nurturing friendships or maybe contacting my daughters. I’m not saying that my goal is to give equal time to all of my roles; my objective is to give appropriate time to each role, which may differ from week to week depending upon circumstances. See my blog post about balance.
2. The Content of My Reviews
a. Quarterly Reviews
Why Quarterly Reviews?
Why do quarterly planning and reviews instead of yearly or 6-month reviews? I find a 12-week period to be a much more realistic time block to plan for than the typical half-year or yearly review.
When I plan for longer than a quarter, I overestimate my ability to get work done and invariably assign my future self much more than I can realistically handle. I can get my mind around a 12-week period, and be more realistic about what I can get done.
I procrastinate if I have a half-year or year to get things done. I rationalize, “I have a whole year to do these things,” and delay getting busy working on them. When I know I only have 12 weeks at most, it motivates me to get to work.
For more information on using 12-week periods for planning and implementing, see the excellent book, The 12 Week Year.
The Content of My Quarterly Reviews
When I do a quarterly review, I do 5 major tasks:
1. A thorough roles audit. I examine each of my life roles and ask a series of probing questions about each. Occasionally, I revise my “best version of me” statement to reflect new or modified thinking about a role, or even discover new life roles or reorganize the roles that I’ve already identified.
2. Discover and process new action items. As I work through my roles, I almost always have new ideas about things I want to do to improve my performance in each role. I process those by placing them in my task manager or habit tracker to make sure they get done.
3. Do an overall review of the last quarter. I think about my wins, my lessons (what I screwed up), what I’m looking forward to, and what’s on my mind.
4. Review my challenges in the last quarter, and ones I might face in the next quarter. I attempt to learn from my mistakes in the past and plan for possible challenges in the future.
5. Review my past and current projects, and decide what projects to take on in the next 12 weeks. I think about what resources I might need to gather to complete these projects.
For more information on quarterly reviews see How to Do a Quarterly Reflection & Planning Session.
b. Weekly Reviews
When I do my weekly review, I do these 5 tasks:
1. A basic roles audit. I ask myself 3 questions about each role: 1) How am I doing?; 2) What could I do better?; and 3) What am I doing well? These questions prompt me to do a good open-ended evaluation of how I’m doing in each role and acknowledge the negatives, and the positives, in a gentle, non-condemning way.
2. Look ahead to the coming week. I examine my calendar and upcoming tasks to get a sense of what appointments and tasks I’ve already scheduled for the next week. This gives me an idea of how much time I have to work on my projects.
3. Review my progress on the projects I’ve planned for this 12-week period. I try to measure whether I’m making good progress, or need to spend more time on a project.
4. Do a systems cleanup. During the week I’ve likely added items to the inboxes of my task manager (Things), my PKM system (Craft), my long-term storage (DevonThink), and temporary holding (Drafts). Thses items need to be processed. I also clear out my email inboxes, and process and remove any items on my Mac desktop.
5. Time-block my coming week. I insert time blocks in my calendar that show when I intend to work on my projects or tasks. I indicate what I’m going to be working on during that block, so I know what I’m doing when the time comes. I try to treat these as appointments with myself that I don’t break unless absolutely necessary.
3. How to do Review and Planning Sessions
When I do reviews, I need some structure. I’ve developed a quarterly reflection and planning template, and a weekly review template. These include all the questions and activities I want to do during a review or planning session.
I use copies of the templates in the Craft app to guide my process, record my answers to the questions, and fill in checkboxes to show my completion of the activities. I highlight any action items that have come up and transfer these to my task manager or habit tracker.
I find that for me, it works best to do my weekly review on Sunday afternoon. That way I’m reflecting on the past week, and planning for the coming week. When I do my quarterly reflection and planning sessions, I typically go overnight by myself somewhere away from home. I find that taking an afternoon, evening, and part of the next day gives me the time I need to focus and reflect deeply, and do the planning I need to do for the next 12 weeks.
I find weekly reviews typically take me from ½ hour to an hour. Quarterly reviews can take 3-4 hours to 12 hours depending on how deep you want to go.
Give Quarterly and Weekly Reviews a Try
Quarterly and weekly reviews are an important part of my system for living an intentional, balanced life. Through these reviews, I can reflect on the past, examine my progress, plan for the future, and identify new action items.
My reviews are based on life roles and feature time blocking, systems clean-up, and in-depth audits of my roles. With this system, I can ensure that the important things get done, and I manage to take appropriate time for each role, so I can live a balanced life.
I encourage you to give quarterly and weekly reviews a try. Although it takes some time to complete the reviews, I think the time invested is probably more productive than anything else I do. It pays huge dividends.