How a Weekly Review Boosted My Productivity, Reduced My Stress, & Let Me Look Forward to Mondays
Decluttering Your Time with Aligned Productivity is True Life-Changing Magic
Sandra Halling’s weekly review group saved my job, my health, my relationships, and possibly my life during the pandemic.
After re-writing the beginning of this post multiple times, that’s the simplest way to say it. I was lucky enough to be part of her group that gets together every Friday at 2pm to tackle a series of questions about the week.
I can hear some of you shrugging already: what’s the big deal? I check over my calendar, too.
Dude, you don’t even know. Sure, we looked at our calendars. But the questions she created were so much more.
It was about perspective, preparation, and peace of mind.
Sandra’s questions were in a template that she shared with us, grouped into sections. It was in the Notion app, but we didn’t have to use it. The magic was in the questions themselves.
Here’s what we explored every week:
Recap the Week
You know those times when you hit the end of the week and feel like you got nothing done?
This section is the antidote. I get to write down the biggest wins, the top tasks, the impactful decisions and how they worked out. Pretty standard for a review, but then there are questions that start to dig deeper:
Where did I grant myself permission to do something that felt hard, or allowed me to put myself first? What might make next week just a little bit better?
For a recovering workaholic like me, those questions start to get past the hustle-culture conditioning, just a bit. But it’s…uncomfortable. It’s not about optimizing or maximizing and there’s not a KPI in sight.
Sandra encourages us to be kind, not to think too hard about the questions — just put in what comes to mind and move on — it’s only an hour.
Capture & Categorize
This is a good old fashioned “mind sweep” in the Getting Things Done sense of the word.
It’s the practice of taking those things that keep me awake at night and putting them safely into a list. Meetings, events, family stuff, anything, all just added bullet by bullet so that my brain can say (with a John Cleese voice) “Well. There it is, then!”
This is a particular part where if you do use Notion for task management, you can add in items right on the fly. I find that it’s just a relief to get things out of my brain and onto the screen or page.
Plan & Prioritize
Usually I hit this section about halfway through the hour-long review session, and by then I’ve gotten in the groove. I go over the calendar to see what’s coming up and add preparation tasks to that mindsweep list, as well as putting in prep time on the calendar.
Think about that for a moment. I’m scheduling time on the calendar to prepare for things. It’s like a gift to my future self! I won’t forget about date nights, anniversaries, birthdays. Suddenly there is no more panicked rushing before board meetings or product pitches.
Ok, who am I kidding? Of course there is still some rush — “prep time” gets overridden by the urgencies of the moment. But just seeing that time on my calendar helps me reach a peace of mind, a feeling of being ready for upcoming events.
The calendar review is always the biggest win for me — there’s something incredibly satisfying about setting up the time blocks in the calendar, seeing them elegantly slot in next to each other. It’s like legos, but with time.
This section of the Weekly Review has deeper dives, as well — what kinds of things am I avoiding? What are the next steps on my most important projects? What am I waiting on?
And then come some really hard questions. Almost like zen koans; the value isn’t so much from answering them, but rather from the exercise of thinking about them:
Which projects or tasks, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?
These are the questions that set this Weekly Review apart from the hustle culture mindset. Instead of challenging me to work harder, go stronger, these questions ask
What would next week look like if it were simple and easy?
In the time of COVID and civil unrest and economic instability and the firkin’ storming of the U.S. Capitol, these are the questions that are like a cool drink in the desert:
How and when am I going to care for my body, mind, and spirit?
Transition to Next Week
After the often-agonizing productivity soul-searching of the P&P section, Sandra gives us a break with some simple tasks to wrap up things.
Now that we’ve seen what’s coming up next week, who needs to be contacted? What breadcrumbs do we need to leave ourselves and others so that we can “more easily unplug this weekend?” She invites us to think about saying thanks to people who made our week better.
Then there’s the Magic Monday Question: what are you looking forward to?
What is coming next week that I can be happy about? That I can go to sleep on Sunday night smiling about?
It changes your whole view. It feels good.
Process & “Final Thoughts”
The template ends with a simple checklist: schedule things on the calendar, add things to your task manager, file the notes and articles and tabs in whatever system you use for that stuff. She gives room for final thoughts about the process, as well, but I honestly rarely have more to say in this section beyond I am so glad I did this.
Because there’s a real sense of closure. A feeling of accomplishment because I’ve acknowledged the past week, and a feeling of being prepared for what the next week might have in store.
It’s really about the community.
Born in the midst of the pandemic, when our need to connect was growing and the world was losing its collective mind, our community is tight knit…We value transparency, authenticity, and commitment to allowing our own self-care to come before other people’s priorities.
My friend, that last bit, that is the work. — Sandra Halling
You can totally do this entire weekly review on your own. I have, many times, when I haven’t been able to make one of Sandra’s scheduled times.
I’ve also sometimes not had time — or the spoons — for all the questions in the full review, and I’ve used the simpler version she’s provided free for anyone. Click here to take a look (shared with permission). If you do try it — and I hope you do — please say thanks with her ko-fi link if you’re in a position to do so.
But as valuable as the questions have been, the real benefit has been doing it with others. We started as a small group, trying out various templates as Sandra changed them, sharing our wins, our challenges. We got together for Monthly reviews, we chatted on the slack channel she created, and we cheered her on when she asked “hey, do you think other people might want to try this?”
“Say Goodbye to Hustle Nonsense & Still Get Shit Done”
Aligned Productivity (affiliate link) is real and growing. Part mastermind, part accountability group, but all supportive and caring, it’s a group of like-minded people that get together not just for the Weekly Review, but also for a whole program designed to “change your relationship with productivity.”
It’s a group that calls out the toxicity and exploitation that fills so much of the planning and productivity community:
…your effort to create a plan and follow it only ever serves to make you feel bad about yourself. It’s that self blame inherent in the system that makes it especially oppressive…you grasp at magical thinking (or system switching) as a way to solve the problem. — Sandra Halling
Through coaching, quarterly, monthly, and weekly reviews, and other workshops, Aligned Productivity comes at productivity with an attitude of what do you need? How can we help you get it, and “…move toward sustainability, self-compassion, and joy.”
Times like these…we could all use more of that.
Click here for a free simplified version of the Aligned Productivity Weekly Review.
If you use this affiliate link you can save 10% forever off of any of the Aligned Productivity membership plans.
