Every Saturday morning, I take 3-4 hours to think about how my week went and how I’ll make the next one better.

The format has changed over time, but for example, here’s some of what I reflected on last week:

I noticed I’d fallen far short of my goal for written output. I decided to allocate more time to reading this week, hoping that it would generate more ideas. And I reorganized my morning routine to make it easier to start writing in the morning.
I looked at some stats from RescueTime and Complice about what I’d spent time on and accomplished. I noticed that my time spent on Slack was nearing dangerous levels, so I decided to make a couple experimental tweaks to get it down:
- I tried out Contexts, a replacement for the macOS window switcher, which I configured to only show windows from my current workspace—hoping that this would prevent me from cmd+tabbing over to Slack and getting distracted.
- I decided to run an experiment of not answering immediately when coworkers called me in the middle of a focused block of time, and keeping a paper “todo when done focusing” list to remind myself to call them back, check Slack, etc.
I noticed that it felt hard for me to get useful info from the time-tracking data in RescueTime and Complice, so I revisited what questions I actually wanted to answer and how I could make them easy to answer.
- I realized that I should be using Google Calendar, not RescueTime or Complice, to track my time spent in meetings, so I added that to my time-tracking data sources.
- I also made several tweaks to the way I used Complice to make it easier to see various stats I was interested in.

And so on. By the end of the review I had surfaced lots of other improvements for the coming week.

While each individual tweak is small, over the weeks and years they’ve compounded to make me a lot more effective. Because of that, this weekly review is the most useful habit (or habit-generating meta-habit) I’ve built. Here are some of the improvements I’ve made that have come out of weekly reviews:

I decided to experiment with time tracking, realized that it needed to be zero-effort to succeed, and identified RescueTime as the best option, giving me much better data on how I was actually spending my time.
Once I started using RescueTime, I eliminated a bunch of distractions that it flagged. As a result I improved my focused time by 50%

...

sambo1

sambo1

sambo1

sambo1