What are weekly reviews?
Weekly reviews are recurring reviews that you do on a weekly basis in order to achieve mid to long term goals.
Some people call it “meeting minutes”, “weekly status”. I used to call it MMM with my teams at the hostel. MMM for Monday Morning Meeting.
These fast meetings are usually 15-30 minutes “blitz” meetings. For chess players this should sound familiar; “blitz chess game” is a game where you must play as fast as possible… sometimes, you can even win the game just because you play much faster than your opponent.
Usually, weekly status are not meetings where you solve the problems immediately. It is a meeting where you connect everyone, you address the problems, list them down and start orienting who should work together to solve them later this week.
The reason why I talk about these weekly status we do with our teams in a company is because there are a lot of productivity tools used in our business that we can apply to our personal life.
And I’ll try to demonstrate today what a business tool looks like if we apply it for our personal performances.
What is a Meeting Minute in a company?
Minute meetings are recurring meetings that are supposed to serve two main purposes:
- Give a precise idea of where we are at in the project.
- What did you do since last meeting
- What happened
- Clarify if everyone is able to do their tasks and has understood what to do.
- Where are the blocking issues
- Who can help or how to solve them
It is important to dissociate the Meeting Minute with the trainings or team building activities. These meetings are for keeping each other updated on all the aspect of the project; starting with the most urgent and important topics.
During these meetings (usually) you write down a list of things to do, ideas of how to sort your problems, who to work with and things you will need to deal with.
And this depends on your management style, but it is probably easier to let your team members solve the problems on their own after you are sure both you (the manager) and them (employees) are clear on: what is the problem and estimating if they can solve it alone and how they intend to do it. Then, during the next meeting minute you will simply have to review the results and see if it is ok to move on to the next topic or necessary to jump-in and help out.
You can also plan a specific meeting to deal with this issue later in the week or day, so you can spend time training your team and controling a little more how the end result will look like.
I guess both approach should be used depending on the problem, the team and your own management style. But at least, doing a meeting minute can help you decide what approach to choose.
I personally like meeting minutes because they are short and it’s a boost of energy. It’s perfect to connect everyone, be more organized and gain visiblity.
What I was reviewing in a weekly review with my teams?
During a weekly review, I like to review 3-5 variables that will help me understand if the company is afleat or sinking. Each company has their own pilot tools.
For the hostel, here is what we were reviewing:
- Occupancy rate of the week.
- Events planned for the week.
- Employee’s schedule.
- Supplies to purchase and things to repair.
Then we could spend some times on the other issues; what happened last week and how we could learn from it, improve or simply celebrate some things.
What you should review:
- Identify a number or two that can tell you precisely how your activity is doing. For example it can be a productivity ratio, a request amount, occupancy, completion rate, number of email answered, total turnover, etc.
- Make a roadmap; what is the current situation today and how could it looks like until the next review… and identify clearly how to make it happen to get there.
- Try to list down and anticipate the possible blocking issues: review the employee’s schedule, supplies needed, maintenance, externalities, etc.
- Make a clear to do list for everyone.
Why doing weekly reviews for your personal life?
I’ve met so many entrepreneurs that are amazing business owners and leaders. Very inspiring and efficient… But they had a major problem: their personal life was (like mine) a failure.
And I include myself into these entrepreneurs because we were so great at talking about business and strategies for conquering the world… but we were missing BIG TIMES on our personal health, mental health and personal relationships.
And in 2018, when I spent 10 days lying down a hospital bed, were I was nearly dying, having fevers that would make me hallucinate and getting so cold that the nurses had to cover me with 6 blankets to keep me alive… I realized that you are not your business.
Your business could become the number one of its market… but if you are miserable it is not worth it.
And right after being out of the hospital, that’s where I started to make a review of my life.
Surprisingly, reviewing my life was much harder than reviewing my business. It was hard to do because I had never done it before. And also I was not clearly conscious of what I was doing.
But I eventually got started and the more I was chekcing on myself, the more it became clear:
What if I would review myself with the same discipline that I apply to my business?
What about applying business reviews to my personal life?
How I do my weekly reviews
By the way I started doing this with Notion.so and auto-coaching ourselves with Tuesi-Nguyen. I highly recommend you check his story and perspective on weekly reviews as well! Video here.
I am talking about the methodology here.
You can do a weekly review of your personal life using principles of a weekly meeting.
So let’s go. A few paragraph above, I was talking about:
Identify a number or two that can tell you precisely how your activity is doing. Easy, no? For me it could be;
- How many coffees did you drink per day?
- How many hours did you sleep in average?
- How many glasses of water do you drink per day?
- How many times you went to the gym?
- How many friends and family have you called this week?
- How many minutes have you medidated? etc.
Make a roadmap, let’s go:
- What projects are you currently working on?
- What is your current health situation?
- What can you improve by next week?
- What can you learn by next week?
- What would you like to happen, that would make you really happy, before next week review?
- How do you get there?
- Who do you call for help to reach this goal?
- What do you need to learn? How will you learn?
Try to list down and anticipate the possible blocking issues:
- What is happening this week that could be a problem to reach my goal?
Become accountable… the most important?
For this one, usually it’s easier for your personal review than for a company review because you are alone. But one thing I like to do is to tell my friends and my wife that I intend to do this. This helps me to become more accountable and this also helps them to know what I’m planning and respect it.
For example, when I told my wife I would start meditating in the morning, she adapted to it and would make sure not to make noise at this moment.
I think as human beings we need the social connection and we need to know that someone else around us knows our goals and our struggles so that this person can check on us and make us accountable.
If you tell your friends you will start running every morning, they will ask you about your runs from time to time and you want to be sure that your answer is matching with what you said you would do.
It is a bit similar to what I am saying in this blog; “I write everyday”. It is pushing me to keep doing it because I know on the other side of the screen someone will ask about this at some point and I want to feel good when I answer this question.
But you can also fail, you can also struggle to build habits and you can also meet unexpected events. I’ve made a few articles about the subject if you are interested:
- WHY BUILDING NEW GREAT HABITS IS HARD AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SMALL STEPS
- HOW TO DEAL WITH UNEXPECTED OR UNFORESEEN EVENTS
- STOP THINKING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A “FROM ZERO TO HERO” JOURNEY
Have a great day!
