Instead of just scanning your to-do list and checking off the weekly review, schedule some time for it. Once a week, whenever it makes the most sense, schedule a full hour for your weekly review. This may seem crazy if you’ve been doing it in five minutes, but you may as well not do one at all if you aren’t going to do it right. So schedule it for an hour and commit to spending the full hour on it.
Spend half an hour looking at everything you did the previous week. Was each thing really completed? Did you need to do them all? Do you need to do them more or less often? Spend more or less time on each one. Ahh, now that you are doing it right, half an hour may not seem like enough.
Now, take what you learned from last week and apply it to next week. Do you need to move things around, delete some tasks and add others? Use more or less time on some of them. If you do it this way, you will actually be accomplishing something. And, as you develop this habit, you can probably get the review down to just thirty minutes. But not five.
Next, I want you to add a daily review and a monthly review. The daily review will be done at the very end or very beginning of each day, whichever you prefer. It will be a mini-version of the weekly review and will be done the same way, except you are only looking at one day back and one day forward.
It is much easier to evaluate the tasks when they are more immediate. It’s easier to understand the impact of something you did yesterday than a week ago. And as you get used to doing these tasks in tandem, they will each make the other more effective.
Bad habits are hard to break. But so are good habits