Stop 4 of 7 · Weekly
The weekly review
Thirty minutes on Friday that changes next week's calendar instead of describing last week's.
The review that changes something
Most weekly reviews are an account of the week just gone. Alex reads it, nods, and Monday arrives exactly as it would have anyway. The version worth doing produces three things: what slipped and why, next week's three priorities, and the meetings that are being moved to make room for them.
The raw material is two exports. Alex's calendar for the week just finished, and the task list from Notion. Both take a minute to get and together they answer a question Alex cannot answer honestly from memory: where did the twenty-two meeting hours go, and what did they produce.
What the two exports answer
| Export | The question it settles |
|---|---|
| Calendar | Where the hours went, and what recurred |
| Task list | What moved, what slipped, and how far |
| The two together | Whether the time bought the priorities |
Try this
[paste last week's calendar and my task list] Give me three things. First, everything that slipped, with how many days and the most likely cause based on what was on the calendar that week. Second, anything that slipped for the same reason more than once, named as a pattern. Third, the hours spent on each of my three quarter priorities against the hours spent in meetings. Keep it under 250 words.
From that, propose my three priorities for next week. Each one has to be finishable in a week and has to serve a quarter priority. For each, tell me the one thing that will stop it, based on what stopped things last week. Then ask me the two questions you need answered to be sure the list is right.
[paste next week's calendar] Against those three priorities, tell me which meetings I should shorten to fifteen minutes, which I should send a delegate to and who, and which I should decline. For each, one sentence of reasoning and a polite note I can send. Leave my one-on-ones and the dispatch stand-up alone.
The part people skip
The review is finished when the calendar looks different, not when the summary is written. That is the whole difference between a review and a diary. Alex blocks 16:00 to 16:30 on Friday, and the last five minutes of it are spent inside Outlook, moving things. If the calendar for next week is untouched at 16:30, the review did not happen, however good the summary reads.
One more habit makes it compound. Keep each week's review in the same chat inside the operations Project, so the next one can be asked what has slipped three weeks running. Patterns across four weeks are worth more than any single week's account, and they are the things Alex can actually go and fix.