The Magic of Weekly Reviews

Why looking back is critical for going forward

This post is part of Unpopular Psychology’s ongoing series on productivity (earlier posts on the topic are here and here).

As a kid, I found reviews boring. It didn’t have to be any particular kind of reviewing, as long as it was reviewing, I hated it. During exams, I would study a chapter once and never look at it again. I never re-read books. I rarely reviewed my answer sheet at the end of an exam unless I had lots of time left and only if the teacher wouldn’t let me leave the hall. Even then, I would just alternate between glancing at the questions and their corresponding answers presuming that I make no mistakes. For if I didn’t look closely enough, I would not find anything wrong. If I don’t find anything wrong, I won’t have to correct it. This was the first 26 years of my life.

It has now been 2+ years since I have integrated reviews into my life and the experience has been nothing short of magical. So I thought in this week’s post, I’ll try and wave the wand publicly.

I. Reviews and Productivity

Reviewing is so critical for productivity. I have talked in the past about how I’m astonished at the many pop-psych calls to cancel productivity. Maybe it is not that surprising since the current climate is mostly driven by a strong desire to be as anti-past-climates as possible. A lot of the popular notions of the past have been disproved with time e.g. psychedelics will make you ‘mad’ (to now where we use psychedelics for mental health treatment). But sometimes people overgeneralise this pushback trend to say that anything that was considered normal or encouraged in the past was always bad. 

Productivity unfortunately got on the radar at some point and is now being bashed mercilessly. Using the word productivity is itself considered oppressive or as a sign of internalised capitalism. Is it really? 

Most of the anti-productivity folks out there don’t even understand what the word means (has knowing what you are talking about become outdated too?).

Productivity is about maximising your output to input ratio, it is about being efficient so that you can gain more time to rest and recover. It is about getting stuff done and then feeling good about having gotten stuff done, both of which are great for mental health.

Productivity is about going for walks, exercising, eating healthy and about the kind of respites that leaves one feeling replenished and raring to go again. Not the kind where you start scrolling, forget that you are on a break, forget everything on your todo list, and keep scrolling. 

Evidently, I love the idea of productivity, I wrote a non-lyrical ode to it a few months ago. Being a person with high procrastination tendencies, I value it as both a means and an end. Life feels deal-able when I am productive and the only way for me to be more productive is, well, by being more productive.

I am one of those ironic cases of a procrastinator who became a productivity coach. It is a little bit like the reverse of a marriage counsellor getting divorced. Ever since I got hooked onto the idea of sustainable productivity, I have been trying out different things to see what systems/processes work best for me to be able to live my life better in the long term. I struck gold when I stumbled upon ‘Weekly Reviews’. 

II. What are Weekly Reviews?

Weekly Reviews are exactly what they sound like - reviewing what you do week after week after week until the day you die. The main idea is that you engineer pit stops into your life where you pause, look back, strategise, plan ahead.

2 main things need to happen at every weekly review - you need to review (obviously) and  then use that review to plan ahead (maybe not that obvious but very important).

What one of my first weekly reviews ever (from 2021) looked like:

Okay, let’s look at what’s going on in this picture:

On the left hand side, I have what I call my non-negotiable goals for the week. You can see that it is a mix of personal (e.g. run) and professional (e.g. data hub) goals.

It is important to not overwhelm your weekly goals with too many goals especially when you are just starting off. 2-3 main goals max is what I would recommend. If you insist on being ambitious, 5 goals is where I would urge you to draw the line. Anything more than that would be too much to handle (trust me on this).

On the right hand side column is my review of everything I did over the week. If you look closely at the picture, you will see that my review list is longer than my goal list which raises an interesting question - Why did I not do my review against just the 5 goals that I had set? Why list down all the activities that I have done during the week?

This is because as you can see, I had gotten only 2 of my 5 non-negotiable goals for the week down (so much for calling them non-negotiables). They are the ones marked in the weird green in the first column. Very early on, when I had just started with weekly reviews, despite being particular about not setting more than 5 main goals for the entire week, I would still struggle to get them done. I did not understand what was going on. If not on my goals, where was my time going? And hence the long review section - to understand where the hell my time went. I would list down every single thing that I did during that week to understand my time-spending patterns.

I did this week after week after week. Within the first few weeks itself, I started getting answers to important questions - How was I spending my time? Where was most of my energy going? Was I spending my time on activities that replenished my energy or drained it? 

I applied what I found out each week to how I planned the following week. For example, if I saw that the reason that I couldn't get my goals done a particular week is because I was engaged socially (house parties, catching up with friends), I would try and not commit to any social meetings the following 1-2 weeks. Or if I saw that my strategy of getting an evening run in when I take a break from work was not working out, I would plan to shift my run timings to the morning. 

III. Frequency, formats etc.

I do my reviews once a week. I did try moving to daily reviews at some point but that became difficult to stick to. I have tried quarterly reviews too but it felt like there was too much space between reviews. 

To me, weekly reviews seem like a doable, realistic yet effective review frequency.

Of course, the idea is to experiment until you figure out what works for you. Once I got consistent with weekly reviews, I started doing monthly reviews and then later quarterly reviews. But it got too much. So I dropped quarterly reviews. Now I try to stick to the weekly+monthly ones as much as possible and have achieved remarkable consistency over the last 2 years.

Formats:  just use any that you think would work for you. I started off with an Excel sheet with 6 columns:

I recently moved to Notion and continue to largely follow the same review process. If you don’t prefer writing, you can do audio reviews, send voice notes to yourself or something. Remember, the form does not matter.

IV. Final Words

You know that feeling you get around December every year where you can’t for the life of you figure where all your time went? Where it seems like you did nothing all year and feel like a loser? By which time you have already successfully buried your resolution list or have begun to make jokes about it because deep down you feel terrible at always getting started with something and never getting done with anything?

Reviews are going to help you to stop feeling that way. When you start tracking your time, you realise how you spend it which makes it more likely that you will spend it wisely. And even if you don’t spend it wisely, you have a whole lot of data at the end of the year to substantiate your feeling of I'm-a-loser which is valuable in its own way.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that we should feel like losers if we don’t get anything done. But many of us do feel like losers when we give in to the powers of binge and let our days slip. And there is a deeper biological mechanism at play here.

Every time we manage to get past our initial resistance and put in real effort towards our long-term goals, there is a dopamine spike that happens which makes us feel good and accomplished, we feel capable.

The goals-review feedback loop is incomplete without action. The point of setting goals is to get them done. Reviewing is how you figure out if you're working on the stuff you should be working on and if not, reviewing is what will help you figure out what's wrong. But a third and crucial step remains after all this, which is to do something about what you are learning through these reviews. 

Massive coincidence but while I was working on this post, a friend texted: 

She went on to list a bunch of other things that she has done ever since she started doing weekly reviews. I have cropped the full list because it had too many identifying details but here’s what the remainder of that list looks like (after editing for anonymity):

• have started teaching spoken English 

• have started playing a sport 2-3 times a week 

• can now play 6 songs on the guitar

So go ahead, create an Excel sheet or a Notes folder or a physical journal - create something, anything to help you get started on the process of reviewing your life regularly. Your future will soon stop feeling as bleak or as blurry as it used to feel. 

It is a tall claim to make but one that I feel comfortable making - start reviewing consistently, act on what you find and I think the probability of your life never being the same again is 99.99%.

P.S. In a future post of this productivity series, I will talk in detail about the different formats of reviewing both horizontally (e.g. apps, products) and vertically (e.g. guiding questions). If that’s something you would be interested in, keep an eye out.

Also, while we are on the topic of reviews - if you noticed, we didn’t do a monthly review in June. Well, that’s because I’ve switched to quarterly reviews based on feedback from my friends and subscribers. So going forward, we’ll review the Unpopular journey once every quarter. That works for me too.