For the past 10 years, I’ve maintained a habit of doing a weekly review. I consider it an essential practice, which helps me improve my habits and reflect on my life.
When I started my weekly review 10 or so years ago in my early 30’s, I did so because I felt a need to reflect on my life. I kept myself so busy with work, socializing, and reading that time just slipped by without my noticing. I could barely remember what I did the past week, let alone the past day. And I often felt like I was merely reacting to events, rather than acting purposefully.
I began with a completely unstructured prompt, “How was my week?” and just wrote. Though better than nothing, after a few months I began to feel that my approach was disorganized.
Then my good friend Ed shared his practice with me, showing me how he tracks various metrics using a spreadsheet. Upon seeing his spreadsheet, I initially felt intimidated. “This is intense! How can I ever hope to achieve this level of rigor?” I thought.
After the intimidation wore off, I felt inspired by his more structured approach and spent an hour setting up my own tracking spreadsheet and journaling template. I organized it to track a few simple things I wanted to prioritize. As I began using it, I updated the template to improve how it worked and also to reflect my changing priorities.
Over the years, I’ve evolved my weekly review into a useful practice that allows me to take more agency in my life.
To get maximum benefit while taking minimal time, I’ve designed my weekly review practice to be quick to update. Each morning, I spend 30 seconds jotting down metrics from the prior day. Each evening, another 30 seconds reflecting on the day. Each weekend, I spend 20 to 45 minutes journaling and planning. I reflect on my past week, reviewing my daily metrics and writing down my thoughts on select topics. Then, I think about my upcoming week.
Metrics Tracking: Tracking my daily and weekly metrics has helped me improve in a variety of areas, including sleep, keeping in touch with friends, and tracking my stress levels. Tracking my sleep, for example, revealed how undisciplined I was with my sleeping habits. For years I wanted to sleep better, but I made little progress and I had no idea why. So I started writing down my bedtimes and hours in bed. Although I thought I had decent sleep discipline, the numbers during my initial 2 weeks of tracking told a different story. I felt shocked to see how late I went to bed and how short my time in bed was. With that awareness, I began to experiment. How could I get to bed on-time? I set a bedtime alarm. Why couldn’t I stay asleep longer? Sometimes unconscious stress made me wake up early, so I began meditating before bed. Other times, outside noise woke me up, so I began using a sound machine and wearing earplugs while I slept. With each experiment, my metrics improved. This iteration enabled me to eventually sleep more and better.
Journaling: Although I kept a journal as a teenager, I stopped as I got busier in high school. When crunched for time, I didn’t have the discipline to make time for journaling, so I just let it go. Now, I view journaling as a major priority. It forces me to reflect on how I put my priorities into practice. Reminding myself of my priorities helps me keep them in mind in my moment-to-moment consciousness, similar to how learning a new word makes us notice it more often.
Furthermore, psychologists argue that writing is thinking. Writing forces us to make our thinking explicit so that we can see it and reflect on it. That allows us to notice its deficiencies and revise it. This process of reflection and revision is in the spirit of philosopher Alfred Whitehead North’s dictum, “We must be willing to let our ideas die, so that we ourselves can live.” Journaling allows us to let our bad ideas die privately in dialogue with ourselves.
What to Track: What do I value?
To set up my template, I began by reflecting deeply on my values. “What should I track?” I asked myself. To answer that, I asked, “What are my goals?” That led to me to ask, “Are these the right goals?” To answer that, I asked myself more fundamentally, “What are my values that led me to these goals?”
Contemplating those values, I identified how I wanted to embody them in my actions. Action is where the rubber meets the road between stated values and actual values. I believe the saying that, “If you want to understand what people value, don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.” To make sure I live up to my stated values, I identify the discrete actions that I need to take. I then translate those actions into weekly or monthly habits that I can track.
My values and goals generally center around Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which I consider to be the most comprehensive framework of core human needs. In short, Maslow argues that we must meet these core human needs of our minds and bodies in order to maximize our wellbeing. I discuss this extensively in my book Frameworks for Life.
Where do these needs come from? From our evolved adaptations. To oversimplify, I would argue that we humans consist of a conscious mind emerging from an unconscious mind and biological body. Our minds and bodies evolved to best survive in the external world in which we exist. To best survive in this external world, individual humans cooperated with a tribe of other humans, many of whom were biological kin. To further improve our likelihood for survival, we evolved the cognitive ability to adapt to our external environment. These cognitive abilities enable us to solve problems by learning and changing our behavior, rather than evolving new bodily features; humans adapted to the sea by learning to build boats and fishing nets rather than evolving flippers. Though our modern environment scarcely resembles the natural environments we originated in, our physical, social, and cognitive needs remain. And it’s these needs which Maslow encapsulates well in his hierarchy of needs.
Thus, for a good starting point, I began by tracking my success at meeting these fundamental needs.
Having discussed my weekly review’s contents and the thinking behind it, let me now share the details of my practice and my templates.
Morning Routine
Each morning, I write down my metrics from the prior day on my tracking spreadsheet using the Google Sheet app on my phone (see the “DailyQ-Morning” tab on the spreadsheet described below). I do this before I meditate. This is part of my morning routine, which I discuss in my essay, On Morning Routines: Building Momentum Early.
I may also do a quick “Morning Pages” style journaling, which is a stream-of-consciousness writing practice that can be as short as 3 minutes. This is inspired by the book The Artist’s Way.
Evening Routine
Though I’ve been less disciplined at this, I’ve found it useful to reflect on my days in the evening. I try to practice the idea of “Homework for Life,” which storytelling champion Matthew Dicks shares in his book Storyworthy. Each evening, Dicks asks himself a question: “If I had to tell a 5-minute story about my day today, as mundane as it might be, what would it be?” Then, he writes 1 or 2 sentences about it, which is just enough to remind him of the memory and short enough that he’ll do it consistently. This practice, Dicks says, helps him polish his “storytelling lens,” his ability to interpret moments of his life that he would normally forget into meaningful narratives. That, in turn, helps him stay more present and grateful in his daily life.
Weekend Routine
Each weekend, I review my weekly metrics tracker and do my weekly journaling.
My Metrics Tracking Spreadsheet (Google Sheet link)
To review my weekly metrics tracker, I update my Google Sheet on my computer to fill in different prompts, and copy down formulas for my daily metrics to populate them on my review sheet.
I’ve updated the Google Sheet so you can copy it and immediately use it if you’d like. Note, all input cells are colored light blue.
Here’s a brief overview of my spreadsheet’s worksheets:
- Weekly Review – A summary of metrics, some input directly and others pulled from other sheets. Some are input directly on this sheet (cells colored light blue), whereas I have many lookup formulas that pull in data from other sheets. In the headers, I indicate whether I type some metrics directly on the sheet (“type on sheet”), whereas others are pulled in from other sheets (“DailyQ” from the DailyQ-Morning sheet, or “FitbitData” from the Fitbit Data sheet). Also, yellow cells throughout the spreadsheet represent key inputs (e.g. starting week of the template, or key daily questions).
- Charts – Graphs that visualize data from the Weekly Review sheet.
- Plan Framework – A place for jotting down values and translating them into long-term goals and short-term actions. I’ve left my lifetime goals and ways of translating these into actions as an example.
- DailyQ-Morning – This is the sheet I fill in each morning. Each weekend I copy the lookup formulas in the “LOOKUP FIELD” down to the last entry – this allows the Weekly Review tab formulas to pull in these metrics.
- Fitbit Data – A manually input record of weight and sleep data from my Fitbit app. I use a Greater Goods Bluetooth scale each morning to track my weight, and a Fitbit Charge 3 to track my sleep. (Note, I’ve loved the Fitbit Charge 3 for many years. My Fitbit Charge 5 had terrible watch faces and it died after only 1.5 years!)
- Evening – An evening 3-minute journaling sheet, which is part of my evening routine. I’ve pared it down to these 4 questions (3 reflection, 1 gratitude), which seem to be short enough for me to actually do.
To extend the tracker to future dates, simply copy down the final row of “Weekly Review” as far as you’d like. Then copy down the bottom row on Charts, DailyQ-Morning, Fitbit Data, and Evening. The formulas are all dynamically linked.
My Weekly Journaling Template
As for my weekly journaling, each week I copy my journaling prompts and write a minimum of one sentence per prompt. This can take 15 minutes or an hour, depending on how much time I have and how much I need to process. I use Google Sheets to write.
My Journaling Prompts:
1. Overview
- Overall:
- Spouse:
- Child 1:
- Child 2:
- Friends:
- Parents:
- Work:
- Fitness:
- Sleep:
- Diet / Weight:
- Meditation / Mindfulness:
- Reading / Education:
- Writing:
- Networking:
- Cooking:
- Financial:
- House:
- Gratitude – I’m grateful for:
2. Start / Stop / Continue
3. What was my best use of time this week?
4. What was my worst use of time this week?
5. What am I most anxious about in this coming week?
6. What experiments would I like to run this week?
7. How was my self-discipline this week? How could I improve?
8. Goals and Questions for Next Week
Conclusion
This practice helps me maintain a structured approach to personal growth. By consistently reflecting on and refining my priorities, I’ve built a system that keeps me aligned with my values, goals, and overall well-being.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and any effective practices that you have.