Unleash Your Productivity By Performing Weekly Reviews
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The Importance of Weekly Reviews and How to Start Your Own
If you’re constantly wondering what to work on, you don’t have clear deadlines, and your work seems all over the place, then weekly reviews might be your salvation.
In fact, disorganization is one of the leading causes of procrastination. Not knowing what’s important leads to not knowing where to begin, and then, not focusing on the most important tasks. In this issue, I’ll share everything you need to know about weekly reviews, best practices, and how to use them to increase your productivity and reduce both your procrastination and work anxiety.
What are weekly reviews?
A weekly review is a chance you get every week to review work completed, pending, and in progress. According to David Allen, Getting Things Done author, “The Weekly Review is the time to: Gather and process all your stuff. Review your system. Update your lists. Get clean, clear, current, and complete. You have to use your mind to get things off your mind.”
These weekly reviews of work help you paint a realistic picture of your priorities and progress, and allow you to define actions to work on pending or overdue tasks. These can look like to-do lists with sections, Kanban boards, text paragraphs, emails, entries on your project management tool, or Loom videos.
Weekly reviews are also great for ensuring that you’re putting your energy in the right places and that you get to reward yourself after tough weeks.
Benefits of doing weekly reviews
Weekly reviews can be highly beneficial for individuals and teams that choose to implement them. Some of the most common benefits include:
- Saving time and money: Ensuring that you’re prioritizing work properly and having the right direction to adjust those priorities will allow you to spend less time deciding what to work on. You’ll become more efficient.
- Building awareness of teammates’ work: It’s a great benefit for departments that don’t necessarily have intersecting work, or for those whose work intertwines. Having weekly reviews gives you an idea of where colleagues’ minds are at, allowing you to adjust and align with them — or to ask them to adjust their priorities.
- Improving your relationship with your manager: Weekly reviews are a way of reviewing work, but your manager shouldn’t be using them as a micromanaging tool. Instead, these reviews should help to keep your manager in the loop while allowing them to support you if needed.
- Having better team communication: Since weekly reviews allow team members to be aware of the work their team is doing, colleagues can offer or request support if they have a packed week.
- Keeping track of your progress and making it easier for quarterly or annual reviews: Filling out quarterly or annual scorecards can be a dreadful process if you don’t have a historical record of your progress or work. Doing weekly reviews helps you document your progress and have it handy for whenever you need to fill out your review scorecard or give reviews to colleagues.
- Reducing stress and anxiety caused by pending tasks: Having a pending task constantly on your mind can cause a lot of stress, and it can make it harder for you to concentrate on other things (work or non-work-related). Writing it down can help you extract those thoughts from your brain and save them for the future.
- Allowing you to consistently work towards goals: If you don’t work towards them, goals are just sentences on a piece of paper. Ensuring that you’re working toward them every week allows you to actually reach them.
- Reducing busyness and increasing productivity: Being productive is about making the best use of your resources and working on the tasks that are relevant to your priorities. Weekly reviews allow you to ensure that you’re doing valuable work that only you can do.
- Planning better: Doing consistent weekly reviews helps you understand how much work you can do in a week, and once you get a better sense of that estimation, you’ll get better at planning.
- Reducing procrastination due to disorganization: One of the causes of procrastination is not knowing where to begin or what to work on first. Organizing your work weekly helps you know exactly what to work on every day.
Good weekly review practices
Weekly reviews have a goal and guiding principles, but are pretty personal documents that you can modify to serve you best. To edit and adjust to your needs you can follow some of these best practices.
Read the complete issue at ProductiveGrowth.
