Few habits have done more for my effectiveness than the weekly review. Carving out even thirty minutes a week to step back and organize your thoughts, projects, and objectives can change the tone of your entire week – and over time, the momentum of your leadership. I recently found a particularly well-structured approach to this practice in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative, and it’s clear and practical enough that I want to share his full outline with you below.
Weekly Checkpoint Focus:
- Challenges, the Big 3, Clustering
- Relationships: Circles, Head-to-Heads, Core Team
- Energy: Whole-Life Planning, Pruning
- Stimuli: Study Plan, Notation, Purposeful Experience
- Hours: Idea Time, Unnecessary Creating
Block off twenty minutes on your schedule for the Checkpoint, then work through each of the practices and where appropriate schedule them in your calendar.
Weekly Checkpoint Prompts
Focus Challenges: Look at, or create, a comprehensive list of your projects. Do each of them have associated Challenges? If not, create them.
- Big 3: What are your Big 3 for the week? Write Challenges for each of the Big 3.
- Clustering: Are there ways you can structure similar work this week so that there is less task switching? Block specific time on your calendar for these activities.
- Relationships Circles: Do you have a circle meeting on the calendar? Do you need to prepare for it? If so, put time on your calendar.
- Head-to-Heads: Do you have any head-to-heads this week? Do you need to prepare? When will you do it? Put time on your calendar.
- Core Team: Do you need to reach out to a member of your core team for advice on something? If so, add it to your task list for the week or fire off a quick e-mail.
Energy
- Whole-Life Planning: Are there any potential conflicts this week between work and personal activities or expectations? How will you get ahead of them?
- Pruning: Is there anything that you’d planned but now realize may not be a good idea, given your upcoming schedule? How can you prune it? Additionally, are there any “hard runs” in which you’ll have all-day or back-to-back meetings? How will you plan something energizing around or between them to prevent burnout and stay energized?
Stimuli
- Study: When will your personal study times be this week? Put them on the calendar. What will they consist of? Take a look at your Stimulus Queue and map your week’s stimuli.
- Notation: Take just a few minutes to glance at your notes from the previous week as well as the indexes in the front of your notebook.
- Purposeful Experience: Do you have one on your calendar this week? When will it happen?
Hours
- Idea Time: When will you structure your Idea Time this week? What will you focus on during these sessions? Put it on the calendar with the associated project name.
- Unnecessary Creating: What will you do for Unnecessary Creating this week? Put it on your calendar.
So, here’s my challenge to you this week: block thirty minutes, pull out Henry’s outline, and actually run through it. Not someday—this week. To make this practice even easier to build into my routine, I’ve added a customizable weekly review page in my Agendio Planner that I can shape to fit my priorities and projects – you can create your own Agendio Planner here.
I’d love to hear how it goes, so hit reply and let me know what shifted (or didn’t) 🙂
