How a Weekly Review Can Help Keep Your Life on Track
I do a weekly review on a Saturday at the end of each week. I think a regular weekly review is a useful process to reflect on the week that just went by, to track progress towards your goals and stay on track to achieving your yearly goals.
Why should you do a weekly review?
The benefits of a weekly review include:
- It allows you to reflect on the week.
- It allows you to appreciate the good things that happened during the week and any areas of improvement and/or focus for the week ahead.
- It allows you to stay on top of long term tasks.
- It allows you to stay on track of your goals and identify early if you are deviating from them.
- It allows you to monitor and keep on track of your habits.
- A monthly review is more of a wider snapshot as it is over a longer period of time, so more for measuring progress, however, a weekly review allows you to stay on track and identify if you are going off rails early so that you can intervene before it becomes too problematic, and you end up in a negative downwards spiral.
My process for doing a weekly review
I do my weekly review in Notion. I'll cover the process in this article, but have also made a video guide on how I do my weekly review, if you prefer to watch a video instead:
If you want to grab my Notion template for my weekly review, you can do so here and duplicate it into your own Notion workspace:
If you prefer to read instead, here is my step-by-step guide for how I do my weekly review on a Saturday:
Duplicate the weekly review template
- Duplicate the Notion template and rename it with the number of the week. I use the app called Dato, which is a clean Mac menu bar app for your calendar. You can configure it to show the week numbers like this:
I just write the name of the week in the title of my weekly review page:
Review of physical health
- Have you been to the gym regularly? Are you progressing well in your workouts and putting in effort? Is there anything you are doing well or need to change?
- Have you been tracking your calories and nutrition? Have you been eating healthily? Is there anything you can change about your nutrition plan?
- Have you been staying adherent to taking your supplements?
- Review your sleep tracker and see your sleep quality and time for the week. Have you been getting enough sleep and good quality sleep? If not, what can you try and do to improve this for the week ahead?
- Measure your weight and log it on MyFitnessPal. Review the trend.
- If you are aiming to bulk, are you gaining enough weight, typically around 0.25 to 0.5 kilograms (0.5 to 1 pound) per week? If you are gaining too much weight, are you eating too much? Reduce your calorie intake by 250-500 a day and re-evaluate your meal plan. If you are not gaining enough, do you need to increase your intake?
- If you are aiming to cut, are you loosing enough weight per week at a consistent level. If you are loosing too much, you may be loosing muscle mass as well as fat, so again re-evaluate your meal plan.
Review of business
- This depends on the nature of business you have, if applicable to you. Review what you need to review here, as it is different for different people.
Review of mental health
- Are you meditating regularly? I use an app called Headspace to do the daily meditation in the morning.
- Are you journaling regularly? Journaling is a good way to get your thoughts out of your mind and clear your mind. It's very useful and feels very therapeutic.
- Are you having negative automatic thoughts regularly? I use a Google forms to track my negative automatic thoughts using CBT techniques in order to identify any cognitive distortions affecting the way I think.
- Therapy - this does not necessarily have to be formal therapy sessions, as not everyone needs one, however, every one needs some form of social support from loved ones and to share what you are going through with people who understand you.
Review of career
- Similar to business, this is different for different people, so here just review what makes sense to you.
Review of other essential areas of life
- Are you sticking to your budget? Are you saving or investing money according to your plan?
- Are you reading a book regularly?
- Are you sticking to basic hygiene habits such as brushing and your skin care routine?
Review your habits
Have a look at the list of habits you want to implement and review them to see if you are sticking to them.
Review your hobbies
Hobbies allow us to unwind and de-stress and take your mind off things. You should engage in a hobby if you are not doing so already.
Things to implement
I have a list of things I want to slowly implement in my life, organised by the Eisenhower matrix principle into important and/or urgent. Have a look at this and see if there are any you can start implementing.
Inbox to-dos
I use Things 3 to manage my to-do list. Anything I want to do at some point without being bound to a particular date, I will dump them in the Inbox section. Now is a good time to review this and see if I can work through any of them.
Flat cleaning
Take some time to make your environment nice and clean. Even a simple, quick cleaning routine can be effective to make sure your area stays tidy, which in turn will keep your mind tidy.
Wish list
I have a wish list page where I jot down things I want to buy. This is an opportunity to review this page to see if I still want those things, to see if I can budget for any of them, or to see if I need to save up for them.
Car maintenance
Looking after your car is essential to reduce the chance that it breaks down on you randomly. I have a car maintenance routine that I will review, more so monthly, but you can even do it weekly if you prefer.
Actions
I will now take some time to do the following actions:
- Review your calendar for the week ahead and schedule when you are going to go to the gym. I use Google calendar to manage my schedule.
- Plan errands such as laundry, shopping, meal prep, haircut.
- Plan a self-care activity to spend some time with yourself.
- Tidy a Notion page. I put links to pages I want to tidy in a page called "Page maintenance" on my Notion dashboard. This is a chance to review pages in this and tidy one of them.