The Weekly Life Retrospective

Outside of my business, I don’t hold down projects for long. It’s an ongoing battle between short term vs. long-term gratification. I start new hobbies which eventually dither, leaving me with wide but shallow knowledge.

As an experiment, I drew on some of my software development skills and started to do a weekly retrospective of my life.

Every week, I start with the following template and fill it out

• What have I done this week that went well?
  
• What didn’t go so well?
• Have my patterns around projects and hobbies changed?
• What have you done to improve XYZ situation? (Some long-term goal)
• Action: Clean out todo list tasks (GTD-ish style)
• Action: Write some next tangible steps for tasks in my inbox.
• Have I setup any rewards for myself / have I rewarded myself?

This can take an hour, it can sometimes be difficult to remember what went well in a week (I throw everything in here, relating to my goals or not) and the act of doing this retrospective is building a habit itself.

I’ve been doing this for a few months, and have had a few realisations along the way. It became clear that I don’t reward myself when hitting important milestones, this meant all work and no play.

I also slowly started to understand that jumping between projects doesn’t mean abandoning them. If the energy isn’t there, I’ll revisit when I feel like it- and not let it burden me in the meantime.

Tracking behaviour over a longer period of time can help you to identify patterns and form deeply ingrained habits. It won’t necessarily change your behaviour but you can start to understand it.