Happy New Year 🎉
Hope you’ve all enjoyed some well-deserved rest and are feeling good about 2026.
Over the weekend, my team and I hosted our 2-day Productivity Summit where we had a whole bunch of you guys on a single Zoom call, reflecting on 2025 and thinking about our upcoming goals for the new year ahead – immaculate vibes all round.
A big part of that involved setting some Quarterly Quests for the next 90 days – or in other words, setting some high priority projects that are going to get the most time and attention over the next 3 months.
But just like New Year’s resolutions, there’s a risk that you end up completely forgetting about them. Life gets busy, the day-to-day stuff takes over, and before you know it, you’re 2 months into the year and you can’t even remember what you said you’d focus on back in January… trust me, I’ve been there 😅
This is where the Weekly Review comes in and I’m such a big advocate of it.
The Weekly Review is an absolute classic in the world of productivity and it was popularised in 2001 by productivity guru David Allen in his fantastic book, Getting Things Done.
It’s basically a built-in reminder system to keep strategically orienting yourself towards your intended goals, and this habit has probably had more impact on my productivity and sense of direction than any other practice I’ve adopted over the years.
Even better, it doesn’t need to be this elaborate 8-hour routine. Spending just 15-20 minutes reflecting on the past week and planning for the one ahead will do absolute wonders for your productivity.
And after doing this for years now, I’ve settled on what I call the 3Rs: Remind, Reflect, and Plan.
1️⃣ Remind
This is where you remind yourself of your most important priorities, goals, and quests. It sounds obvious but it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day stresses of life and completely lose sight of what you’re actually trying to achieve.
The questions I ask myself here are:
- What were our Quarterly Quests and how are they going?
- What were last week’s 3 priorities and how did they go?
2️⃣ Reflect
This second step is about reflecting on how your week has gone and celebrating your wins, because we often ignore the things that actually went well.
The reflection piece also helps you spot patterns. Like if you’re noticing that you’re consistently struggling with the same challenge week after week, that’s usually a sign that something needs to change in your systems or approach rather than just trying harder and burning yourself out.
Here are the questions I specifically ask myself:
- What were the good and great things that happened last week?
- What were last week’s challenges? In what ways did we not act in line with our intentions for the week? And what would we like to change (if anything) next week?
3️⃣ Plan
Finally, you plan for the week ahead by defining your priorities and getting stuff into your calendar.
The questions I ask myself are:
- Look ahead to the next 2 weeks – does anything need scheduling in our calendar?
- What are our top 3 outcomes for the upcoming week? Let’s make sure those are in our calendar.
- Have we updated our tasks and projects list (or in other words, our to-do list)?
When you’re first getting started with your Weekly Review, this might seem like a lot. But the thing is, don’t let perfectionism stop you from starting – a quick 5-minute check-in is infinitely better than no review at all.
Besides, when I first started getting into this, I strategically kept it really simple – just looking at what stuff was left incomplete and updating my to-do list – because I knew if I tried to make it too elaborate, I just wouldn’t do it.
Then, over time, I started adding in the reflection aspect, then the celebration bit, and now it’s this whole thing… but I only got here by starting small and building the habit first.
So the most important thing for you right now is to try it out. Schedule it as a recurring event in your calendar.