Started doing a proper weekly review five weeks ago. The first one took nearly three hours, and they've settled at around two, which is a big chunk of a Friday afternoon and I can feel myself starting to skip it. Everything I read makes it sound like a brisk half hour. Is it supposed to get faster on its own, and roughly when, or does two hours mean I'm doing something wrong?
Splitting mine in two was what made it stick. Twenty minutes Friday to close the week down, clear inboxes, tidy the list, and twenty minutes Monday morning to plan. Two short things I'll actually do beat one long thing I dread by a mile.
Same split here. The Friday half is mechanical enough to do when tired, which is the whole point, and the planning half gets a fresh brain.
Write yourself a checklist of the actual steps and follow it in the same order every week. Most of the two hours is probably deciding what to look at next and getting distracted on the way there. Mine is eleven lines on an index card and it's the reason it takes half an hour.
Also, a review that's too long to face is worse than a shorter, sloppier one you keep doing. If it comes to it, do twenty minutes of the most valuable parts, which for me is clearing the inbox and looking at next week's calendar, and let the rest go. Consistency is doing more work here than thoroughness.
That's the permission I needed. I'd been treating it as all or nothing and skipping it was becoming the default.
@timeblock_tess · last yr. · 3 replies
It gets faster, and five weeks is early. Mine went from about two and a half hours to a steady 35 minutes over roughly three months.
The reason yours is long is almost certainly that you're doing work during the review rather than reviewing. If you open an email during it and reply, that's not a review, that's a Friday afternoon of email with a review-shaped label on it.
Try it with a timer and a rule: nothing gets done, everything gets decided. If an item needs 20 minutes of work, it goes on next week's plan and you move on. That single rule cut mine in half immediately.
The other reason it shrinks over time is that the first few reviews are clearing a backlog you built over years. Once that's gone, you're only reviewing one week's worth of change.
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@solo_supper · last yr.
I definitely do work during it. Last week I wrote an entire proposal in the middle of the review and then wondered why it took two hours.
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@timeblock_tess · last yr.
Very common, and it feels productive, which is why it survives. Set a 40 minute timer and let the timer be the bad guy.
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