Weekly Review 5.0: How to Streamline
Your Systems for Long-Term Success

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #525: Weekly Review 5.0: How to Streamline Your Systems for Long-Term Success

Jeff Sanders
Of all my productivity strategies, this is absolutely one of my favorites.

And now, it's even better than ever.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 525.

Weekly Review 5.0 – How to Streamline Your Systems for Long-Term Success.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

In the episode this week, I'll break down what a weekly review actually includes, a full breakdown of my review process, and what has changed in the latest version of my own weekly review.

Let's dig in.

So let's kick things off by discussing what a weekly review is all about.

Before I get to the details, I'll let you know that you can download a free weekly review template in my email newsletter called the 5am club.

Just go to jeffsanders.com/5amclub.

That's jeffsanders.com/5amclub.

Yes, you'll get a free download of the weekly review template as well as other templates as well, so definitely check that out.

Okay, let's get to what a review actually is, what it includes, why it's awesome, why I love it so much.

I first will begin by backing up a bit by saying the review process is not my idea.

It's a grand idea, but not mine.

Originally, I learned of this from David Allen's Getting Things Done system.

I think that most people who discuss productivity in the world today will give David Allen credit for almost everything.

He's kind of the purveyor of so many things.

But this was one thing that I took from his book, the original Getting Things Done book that it has a lot in it.

There's a lot of strategies to pull from.

This is one that I stole from that book.

I have used it every week, nonstop for well over a decade, if not longer than that.

This is an indispensable system for me.

This is a non-negotiable.

There is nothing that's going to stop me from doing a weekly review in some form or fashion.

This week, I'm discussing version 5.0, which really represents some major milestones over the years.

I have upgraded, changed, evolved, tweaked, optimized these systems in every direction.

I want to discuss not only what this system is and how I've improved it, but really just double down on the value that is here so that if you do not have a review system, or you want to improve the one that you have, or do it more often, or do it with more intentionality, that all of those things are possible and should happen if you want to have a phenomenal, productive week.

Let's kick this off with some specificity about what a weekly review actually is.

In the most simplistic form possible, it's literally what it sounds like.

It's a review of what happened last week, but it also includes a plan for what should happen next week.

The whole point of this is not to look back.

The review is not about reflection.

Yes, that's in the title of it.

Yes, you will be doing that, but of course, the whole point is forward action.

It's forecasting.

It's looking ahead.

What should I do next that will be smarter, more intelligent, more strategic, more well-aligned to my goals, more optimized for the life I want to live?

What is my ideal week?

What is my ideal schedule?

What is my ideal system and goal-achieving methodology?

How can a review allow me to make that possible?

From my perspective, a weekly review has a ton of flexibility and subjectivity.

What I'm going to discuss this week about what it can be in general and what it is for me, they're all just ideas.

What it is for you could be literally anything as long as it allows you to live a better life and review things intelligently and plan more effectively.

You can customize this for whatever you want to be.

Take as little time as you want or as much time as you need in order to create a process that is reliable and sustainable and beneficial.

If it's not beneficial, if you don't love it as much as I do, tweak it, make it better.

Take the opportunity to say, "My calendar can be better and here's how.

My goals can be achieved more effectively and here's what I'm going to do based upon my schedule to make sure that's possible."

For me, that's what I'm going for, is a constant evolution and reevaluation of getting the most value from my time.

In the world of time management, that's what we're talking about.

You're managing your energy.

You're managing your projects.

You're managing your health, your finances, your family, your career aspirations, your big goals, your personal hobbies.

All of these things can and should be included in a review to ensure that you are looking at your life holistically and addressing the things that need to be addressed each and every week to optimize what's there.

Having said that, my actual review process takes about one to two hours a week.

I would say on average, it's closer now to two hours, sometimes longer.

It really depends on the complexity of what's going on in that season of my life.

Recently, I wrapped up a bunch of projects.

In the wrap-up process, it took longer.

There's a lot more to review, a lot more to dig into.

Sometimes, it'll take three or four hours to do the review, but it's not a problem.

In fact, if anything, it's phenomenal time well spent because I'm able to dig into the weeds of some projects and goals and get the most value from them that I can.

I don't view that as wasted time.

I don't view that as taking too long.

In fact, I view that as what it needed.

If I need four hours, I take four hours.

If I need 30 minutes, that's all it is too.

That's fine.

The goal here is to take the time you need to get yourself to that place where you say, "I know where I am.

I know what's going on.

I'm very comfortable with last week's process and progress.

Now, I have a good, solid, very doable plan for next week."

Now, for most people, a typical review process, like I said, one to two hours a week on average, most will probably do their reviews on Friday afternoons or possibly at home on the weekends.

For many years, my most common time period for a weekly review were Sunday afternoons and Sunday evenings.

Now that I have two young girls at home, that has changed.

In fact, that's one of the biggest updates I'll discuss later on, but for most people, Friday afternoon or sometime over the weekend tends to be the best time to review and reflect and have enough time set aside to make this process the best that it could be.

In a typical review process, there are a few key things that take place.

The first of which is the obvious, a review of what happened last week.

For most people, it's a very common big picture review of your calendar, your task manager or to-do list, your project manager, any tools or software you have there, a digital notebook if you use one of those, any kind of planner you may use.

I tend to use a few core items, so I'll go through those in a minute, but you're going to look through those tools and software programs that you use to manage your time and your projects and your tasks.

You're also going to review what happened in terms of wins, like big accomplishments, losses, things that did not go well, lessons learned, kind of aha moments, epiphanies, those kinds of things.

Really looking back at the last week, last seven days and asking yourself, what happened?

Objectively, right?

What actually happened on paper, black and white, where I can say with confidence, here are the good things, here are the bad things, here's just the objective reality.

The second big area that is usually included in these reviews are a review of your habits and your systems.

I love this part of it because this is where you really get down to the nuts and bolts of what's included in most people's lives, which is repetition.

Most lives and most of us live out of just such habitual lifestyles, our health routines, our daily habits, our commute to work there and back, what we have for lunch every day.

Like all of these things tend to be so easily repeatable and predictable.

And if you're able to have an objective view over your habits and your systems, well, then you're able to see which habits you've committed to, the ones that are just running your life for better or for worse.

You get an objective view on what you do each and every day that defines how you live.

And so for me, I'm asking questions like, how can I improve my habits?

How can I improve my systems?

How can I tweak what I eat for lunch every day?

How can I make sure I wake up at the right time every day and do the right activities first thing in the morning?

If anything, I spend a lot of time in this area because I'm fully aware, absolutely crystal clear that my habits run my life.

And if I'm going to change my life, I'm going to change my habits.

And the review gives me the chance to review those hopefully in an objective and helpful way.

And then the third and final area of the review that most people spend their time with is a quick look forward the upcoming week to have an optimized calendar.

Now, if you've been the kind of person who plans far ahead, you may be calendaring, you know, forecasting your schedule for months, even years in advance.

And yes, I do that in part.

I'll look at, for example, the school calendar for my daughters.

We know that generally about a year in advance that will be forecasted, you know, for about 12 months out.

Vacations may plan long-term.

There are certain things that I know of big events, big travel.

Those are on the calendar far out.

But most of my life, the vast majority of my calendaring is in the next one to two weeks max.

That's where the detail is.

That's where the real specificity of my life happens.

That's where most of the changes take place is what's happening in the next few days.

If I can be really clear on that, well, then I know I can control for the most part how I live in the next few days.

It's a lot more predictable.

You know, in my book also called the five a.m. miracle, I have a very lengthy conversation about why I do not like long-term planning.

I've discussed that in the podcast many times because long-term plans never pan out.

It just doesn't work.

I love the idea of vision casting and seeing what's big, big, ambitious goals I want to achieve in the future.

But to be specific on exactly when those things happen, the dates associated with those, I mean, come on, we can't predict the future in the next 20 minutes, let alone the next 20 years.

And so for me, what I'm looking for is a calendar that reflects what I think will happen, I'm pretty confident will happen in the near future.

And that's where I have the most control.

And I really don't plan with any kind of detail longer than the next two weeks.

And so my goal of weekly review is to look ahead definitely at the next seven days and then oftentimes it's the next two, maybe three weeks out just to get a clear sense of any major objectives that I have to really focus on.

And so from that perspective, you're asking questions like what has to happen in the next seven days?

Do I have meetings, events, obligations, responsibilities, those things that are must do's and those go on the calendar first.

As I have progressed over the years with, you know, altering my calendar, I will put things on there like meetings or events I know I've committed to, but just as important for me, what has to happen, I'm just in quotes here, what has to happen also includes fitness.

I have arbitrarily upgraded the importance of my fitness schedule to make the argument to myself that it's just as important to exercise as it is to go to a business meeting.

If I don't do that, if I do not view exercise as a must do, as a required activity, it gets bumped.

I'm going to do an episode of the podcast very soon about this topic and I'll get into a lot more detail then, but I will say for now, this is a biggie.

This is a super important topic because if you don't arbitrarily upgrade certain habits, certain activities and view them as must do's, there's a very good chance they will not happen.

There's a very good chance you will continue to postpone, procrastinate, ignore, avoid, delay, insert next thesaurus word here.

You will do all of the things you possibly can to not do the thing you said you would do or you want to do or you were dying to do.

So just do it, arbitrarily make it valuable and make it a priority.

So that's the first biggie on the planning stage is what has to happen.

The next area is what would you love to see happen?

This is your ideal, your big goals, top priorities, really just a fantasy of the week.

I say that as a secondary component because we live in the real world.

What has to happen is going to be there first, right?

You can have a fantasy all you want, but reality is always going to win.

So what has to happen is going to be there first.

What would you love to see happen is then in there second.

Now, maybe over time, what you would love to see happen becomes your reality, and that's a great goal to shoot for, but we're always going to start with the required elements.

We're then going to add in things we'd love to see.

Now that includes planning for a side hustle business.

You want to grow a big athletic event.

You're going to train for a personal hobby you're working on.

You know, you'll learn the piano or learn to speak German or whatever the thing is.

Those could be baked into your calendar at this point.

After those two areas are then there, all that remains should be, and this is the key thing here, unplanned.

So you're going to stop on purpose, not putting anything else on the calendar.

At this point in your planning, the week should look only about half full.

If you do this properly, like really intelligently, there's going to be a lot of white space, a lot of free time, a lot of just openness.

Why?

Here's the reality.

I've written and published two books in my life.

Actually, I've written more than that, but I've published two books in my life.

The first one, the five, a miracle about how to do this process.

The second one is the free time formula.

It is all about this idea that margin and free time are indispensable to your sanity.

You will go crazy if you do not have margin baked in.

Over planning is such a common problem.

If you're the kind of person who says, you know what?

I really want to live an awesome life.

I'm ambitious.

I'm productive.

I've got big goals.

I've got a lot to do.

I'm going to pack my schedule filled with all kinds of tasks and projects and to do's and fantasies and ideals.

Oh, I'm exhausted.

Just thinking about that.

It's like, it's just going to be too much and not too much from the idea that you're overly ambitious.

It's too much of the idea that it won't happen that way.

How you have planned it will not capital N not happen here because there are so many things we do not see coming.

So many things that are unexpected.

This is exactly why I just gave this miniature rant earlier about why I don't do longterm planning.

If you max out your calendar, even the next couple of days, it won't happen that way.

Life will happen instead.

Things you do not expect will show up.

So in order to counter that reality, we have to have flexibility built in.

There has to be margin and free time and openness.

And then when there is, and things don't go as planned, I'll use yesterday as a good example in my life.

My daughter got sick.

I had a whole day planned with business activities, things I wanted to get done.

Technically I did get them all done, but I also had to watch her and take care of her at the same time.

And it was a messy, complicated day.

So did my day go as planned?

No.

Did I get all the things done?

I thought that I would almost, but still not quite.

And so because of that, that's my point.

Things are going to happen.

And to have a schedule that allows for flexibility, that allows for things to be postponed and it'd be okay.

That's a more ideal schedule.

A flexible calendar is the one that's going to keep you sane, keep you happy, keep you productive, and allowing you the enough margin and free time to say, if I happen to be overly productive, if I happen to get a lot done really fast, oh my gosh, now I have tons of actual free time.

And then what is free time?

It's an opportunity to choose the next most important thing and fill that in in the moment.

It's an impulsive decision to say now all of a sudden, wait, I've got three hours free.

I never saw it coming.

Well, what could I bump forward and do early to get ahead?

That's an awesome question.

There are some people who never get ahead.

We're always behind schedule forever indefinitely.

What if you could actually work ahead?

It sounds like a pipe dream.

It sounds like a fantasy, but if you can get yourself to that place, it feels awesome.

It is such a cool feeling to work ahead on projects.

I don't get that chance as often as I would love to, but when I do, ah, it's fantastic.

So this plan for your upcoming week, it's going to include these core elements, the things that have to happen, the things you would love to see happen and nothing margin, free time, openness, white space, all of that to allow the things that have to happen to guarantee they will.

So in a nutshell, that's what a weekly review can include for the average person.

But now it's break down more of my own customized process.

Let's get the nitty gritty here of how I, Jeff Sanders, actually have implemented my own review over these last 10, 15 years or so.

The first, and this is a change that I made back in version 4.0 that came out about a year ago, which is a big change I made back then was the pivot to Google drive or using Google docs for literally everything.

It means Google docs and Google sheets and the whole Google system, everything in the cloud, everything online, everything linkable, everything formatted in the same way.

It's all consolidated in one place.

I made a really big productivity system shift to double down on Google systems.

And I can say confidently a year later that it was a phenomenal move.

It has really streamlined my life, my systems, my checklists, my reminder system, although my reminders come from Nozbe.

So let's back this up a little more.

So Google drive is my online document storage system, right?

My cloud system for documents and spreadsheets and a few other things as well.

But for the most part, it is, you know, PDF files, documents, sheets, I organize the files there, but then if you back it up and say, well, what else organizes your life?

And the answer would be the calendar.

And I use your very standard Mac calendar that comes with the computer.

And I use a task manager.

In my case, it's Nozbe that's N O Z B E.

You can learn more at jeffsanders.com/nozbe.

And so those three systems basically organized 98% of my life in business.

Everything is there.

And one thing that I have seen throughout the years with people who are overwhelmed, my clients who are the most just like in the weeds and can't seem to see what's going on, they lack the big picture vision is they have too many systems, too many apps, too many bells and whistles, way too many things that don't talk to each other, that don't work well, that don't have the sense of cohesion or consolidation.

And so because of that, they're just, it's a mess of noise.

And so if you ask the question, well, where are you in your project?

The answer is, ah, I have no idea, right?

That's just, it's, it's nonsense.

And we're not trying to build a system that makes us feel emotionally just sucked dry.

That can't be a successful way to, to approach the work and the life we have.

So I break it down to really these three key areas.

You're going to have your calendar, you're going to have your task manager and some kind of a document organization system.

And so for my preference, Mac calendar knows me for tasks and Google drive.

And really it's the whole Google workspace system that also pairs well with my business and email management.

But really that's it.

Google is the thing.

So this weekly review process, most of it takes place with these Google docs and checklists.

So that's the kind of big picture technology perspective here.

Now, obviously you can feel free to use any systems that you like, but the real key here, the underlying principle of this is consolidation, simplicity, and fully understanding the tools that you choose to use, right?

I don't care what tools you use.

What I care about is that you chose those tools on purpose.

You understand how they work and you get the most value you can from them for the things you need to accomplish.

And then you stop at that point, you're good to go.

Okay.

So my customized review process, my first step is I do what everyone else tends to do.

I look backwards.

What happened last week?

And so in this process, I'm going to update my progress reports on my projects.

Now, what is that?

My progress reports are the same thing as my project management checklists.

That's a very wordy way of saying I have a Google doc with a series of to-dos for a project.

This is how I manage what I'm working on.

And I'm asking the question, what did I get done last week?

What actions are completed?

And then where am I now?

What is the next action to take?

And then I'll look ahead a little longer and say, what's coming up in the next couple of weeks.

But from a bigger picture perspective, I'm asking the question for this project I'm working on, where do I stand?

All right.

What happened recently?

What is the very next thing to do that's scheduled on my calendar?

And then what's going to happen reasonably soon after that?

That way, if someone were to ask me, Hey, Jeff, where are you in this project?

I can just point to the list and say, I'm right here.

I'm on step seven.

Last week, I finished steps five and six.

This week is step seven.

Next week is step eight.

And that's what I'm doing here.

That's the most simplistic way.

That's what this is.

And so if you have that level of organization for your projects, you know exactly where you are and you know what the next action is and why it's the next most important thing to do.

And if you look at your project list, I'm assuming you have one.

And if you look at it and you say, I don't know where I am.

I don't know what my next action should be.

Then that's your next action is to figure that out.

If you are lost in anything, your next action is to get found.

That's it, right?

Whenever you are confused on what to do next, your goal is to get unconfused, get the clarity you need to move forward.

I do this all the time.

It is very frequent for me to say, my next action is clean up this list.

My next action is organized and forecast this schedule, these things so that I am very clear on what I'm doing next and why that gives me the confidence of saying my next action is clear and it is confidently chosen with evidence, like an evidence-based decision.

Here's what I'm doing and why.

Now I don't have a boss to explain this to, but I do have a wife who does ask me questions.

And I also am accountable to myself.

I don't want to do things arbitrarily or randomly.

I want to do things for a reason and do them on purpose.

So this first step to update progress reports on my projects, oh my gosh, it's my whole life.

It's where all the big things get done.

This is probably the most important thing I do because that's what dictates the next thing I schedule on my calendar.

The next component here of looking backwards at last week is to complete my checklist.

Now I have a specific document that's the template that I referred to earlier in the episode.

Once again, jeffsanders.com/5amclub.

Now on my checklist, I'm going to go through this very simple series of questions.

What are my wins and accomplishments?

What are my losses or problems to solve?

What are my fixes for those problems?

If I already know a fix I want to implement, what aha moments have I had?

You know, big like personal development ideas or brilliant insights I want to make sure I record.

This also includes quotations I came across I really like, they're inspirational or helpful.

And then finally, what am I grateful for in the moments for the things that happened last week?

And the gratitude area here at the end is a pretty cool one, because it always aligns to my wins and accomplishments.

It always aligns to, hey, this thing happened last week, and it was awesome.

And I'm really grateful that that happened.

And so what I'm doing is I'm doubling down on my wins.

And I'm really acknowledging this was fantastic.

I'm very proud of it, very happy about it.

And I want to see more of that going forward.

That strategy of acknowledging positivity and really like being real about it.

So I'm not lying to myself, like I am legitimately grateful for these wins.

It encourages me to then schedule more things that will cause me to feel that way more often.

This is a very important step in the process.

It's what I don't want to overlook.

Because if you don't pause long enough to acknowledge good things, and you spend your whole review system on the fixes, the solutions, the problems, and you think about all the things that are going wrong, it's an exhausting and negative experience.

And yes, problem solving is part of this for sure.

But that's not the whole thing.

That's not what this is about.

This is about doubling down and amplifying successes just as much or more as it is with solving problems.

So I complete the checklist.

I go through this list here, and then that's basically it for the review of what happened last week.

At this point, I have a pretty good handle on what went well, what did not go well, where I stand on my projects.

I have a pretty good idea of what last week was all about.

But my goal is not to spend a lot of time in the review.

If I'm going to spend a lot of time, it's going to be on the next section, which is the planning of next week, the optimizing of the calendar for what's coming up.

Because that's what's going to dictate my success for next week is if I plan intelligently.

So the very first thing I do on my plan for next week is to schedule upcoming fitness.

That's right.

The first thing I schedule here, I said earlier, people will schedule their must-dos.

Exactly.

And this is my very first must-do is I schedule my upcoming fitness.

Now, you may have heard last week on the episode, I talked a lot about a lack of fitness that I've had recently due to a running accident and massive injury to my leg and my left knee.

And that sidelined me like no one's business.

But what I do all the time is I schedule my upcoming fitness first.

That's all my workouts, my gym trips after my daycare drop off with my daughter, hiking and trail running that I do.

Also daily stretching, supplements, health and fitness, just strategies in general, taking care of myself is the very first thing I do when I plan my time coming up.

Now, there's a reason why the healthy productivity perspective is what this show is all about.

The podcast is called the 5a miracle healthy productivity for high achievers.

Yes, that's what this is all about.

I need my health to do my job.

I need to feel fantastic and energized to execute on the goals that I have.

Without my health, these goals are not going to matter much if at all.

So very first thing is I schedule upcoming health and fitness strategies, goals, and all of the things I want to see happen.

And the next area I'm going to schedule more of those must do's my meetings, events, obligations on the calendar of things I've definitely said yes to and feel very strongly I should do.

This also includes personal and family time.

Uh, my business focus blocks of time are here as well.

So on this podcast, I talk a lot about F bots, my focus blocks of time.

Those are the core aspects of my calendar.

I'm in an F bot as we speak, as I am recording this podcast and today's massive focus block of time, the F bot is all about podcast recordings.

And so I tend to record as of, as of this year, uh, five podcast episodes in one focus block of time.

Yeah.

Five episodes in one big block.

Now today I broke it apart to two blocks and had a lunch break in between, but my major focus for today was all of these recordings and I'm in the middle of that.

Now it's going very well.

Thank you.

My goal for last week was to schedule these F bots so I could execute on that this week.

And so yesterday was my scripting and show notes in preparation.

Today, the focus block of time is the recording tomorrow.

It's post-production and editing.

And so I will schedule ahead of time what these big blocks happen to be for this particular podcast batching week that I'm now in.

And this was pre-planned.

And I will also back this up a little further and say, one of the few things I do schedule long-term are these big podcast batching weeks.

And there's a whole other conversation I could get into about batching, but I'll just say this for now.

If you are looking at your calendar to forecast out and you're asking, what are my vacations?

What are my big travel days?

What are the big events we have to go to, right?

Those kind of long-term 12 month out kind of, of calendaring events.

One of the things you can and probably should be scheduling are your big batching sessions.

So if you want to efficiently use your time at the office or at home, you do projects in one big chunk.

You start it, you do nothing but that project, and you finish it.

That's basically what we're talking about.

And so for that example, if my podcast batching, it started Monday morning and usually by Wednesday night or maybe Thursday midday, I'll be done with the whole project completed in three to four days.

And so that literally in this sense would complete a month's worth of podcasts in about three days.

That's an effective use of my time.

If I can do 30 days worth of podcasts in three days, if you want to view it that way, that's what took place.

And so if you can do the same thing for any major projects you have of batching them together and pre-planning those batch sessions on your calendar, you're going to save a ton of time.

It's going to save you an amazing amount of time actually, if it's really scheduled intelligently.

So that's where I'm looking at.

I've scheduled the fitness coming up.

I've scheduled my must-dos and required components, including focus blocks of time and batching, which then brings me to my checklist.

So we're back to that template I mentioned earlier.

And here I've got three major areas that start with the bigger picture and drops down from there.

The first area is the top priority for the quarter that I'm in.

I usually look at that.

I don't tend to have annual goals as much, but I will have quarterly goals.

And usually it's pretty vague.

My quarterly goals generally don't have a lot to them because I don't plan that far in advance.

But the next one is very important.

My top goals for the month, those I get much more specific and those will dictate actions that I take when I schedule my weeks.

And then I break down to my final area, which is the top goals for next week coming up.

And if you want to be even more specific with the weekly goals, I will have specific daily objectives that help me to meet the weekly goals, which are aligned to the monthly, aligned to quarterly, et cetera.

Everything here is in alignment.

One of the joys of a review process is the ability to see all the dots being connected, to acknowledge that today's actions are not isolated.

They're not arbitrary.

They are connected to a bigger picture and they're in alignment with all the other things I want to see happen.

And if you ask yourself, how is this task I'm working on aligned?

And you don't know the answer immediately, there's a pretty good chance that that task is random and maybe even unnecessary.

You could probably cut it and see no negative impact in your life.

That's a really easy way to reduce your workload.

Stop doing things that are not in alignment with goals you have set for yourself.

It might mean saying yes to things you like to do, to do things that you feel like you have to do, but that's going to be more effective and more productive.

And so in theory, you want to live a life where both of those things are possible.

You do things you have to do and you do things you want to do.

But if you find yourself doing a lot of random things that don't feel connected, there's a pretty good chance those random things could be cut or minimized or streamlined or batched or have something applied to them that makes them a lot less significant.

So you can spend more time on what matters most to you.

All right.

The final components of my own customized review process is to then write my weekly goals on my office whiteboard.

And so one thing that I have never stopped doing, and I'm not sure if I ever will, is to get out of my digital world for a few seconds.

So everything I have mentioned here is digitized and has been for a long, long time.

And as things progress, things will continue to be digitized forever.

But I always want to keep some kind of an analog solution, a handwritten solution built into here.

I know a lot of people who use weekly planners where they handwrite goals.

I'm never going to go that direction ever again.

I didn't like it when I did it full time.

I definitely don't like it now.

But one thing I do like to do is to handwrite my goals on the whiteboard that I can visibly see all day, every day in my office.

My computer can be turned on or off.

I can be looking at a certain screen or not.

That changes all the time.

My computer is dynamic, right?

Always changing.

But this whiteboard, it's static.

It just sits there on the wall and says, here are your goals for this week.

Are you working on these?

Yes or no.

So let's go to the whiteboard for right now.

This week is a podcast batching week.

And so what I have listed on there, it says the date of the first day of the week, which for me is Saturday through Friday.

We'll get to that in a second.

But my first day of the week is right at the top.

So February 3rd is what it says here.

And then I have a list of my objectives for the week.

In this case, I have seven objectives.

The very last one is listing my exercise.

And the six before that are business focused goals for the week.

And of those six, five of them are the five podcast episodes I am recording.

And so what I'm doing as I work through this batching week is I'm putting tally marks next to each episode number.

So for example, this is episode 525, working on right now.

And I already have two tally marks next to it.

The first one for the show notes page, second one for the script.

The third one that I'll be adding in a few minutes is the recording.

And then probably tomorrow will be the fourth and final one for the post-production process.

And then that task will be completed.

So that's a very specific example.

But what I do every week is I write down, here are my top goals for the week.

And as I work on that project, usually a focus block of time or a specific milestone was hit, I give myself a little tally mark to acknowledge I worked on this.

I made progress in this area.

And then once that task is complete for the week, I'll put the final tally mark on it.

I'll cross it off.

And I'll go on to the next task.

So what that means is it's a very tangible and specific way to visibly see where I stand with my progress for the week at all times.

I think this has been essential for me.

I didn't use this for a long time.

When I added it in, it was just as brilliant aha moment.

Like I have to keep this.

This is great.

I had one on my desktop for a while, the small whiteboard.

I had a cork board for a while that I use, but the whiteboard is the thing.

It's the most effective solution.

And so if you're looking for a way to visibly see your goals, have an analog solution like that whiteboards are cheap.

You can get them anywhere and they're so effective.

If you use them for the visibility of where your focus should be the most important, here's the next thing to do.

And then some kind of a system to have a tally mark or some kind of way to monitor progress towards that goal.

And then when it's done, you cross it off and it feels good to do that.

That's the dopamine hit that you get from being productive.

And so in a nutshell, that's where the weekly review then for me ends that final piece of putting those goals on the whiteboard.

Now there's more to it than this.

And by more to it, I mean, I have a much larger review process than just the weekly review.

If you want to look at the totality of what that includes, yes, there is the once a week for me, that's actually now on Fridays, which we'll get to.

So there is actually a midweek review.

And so what I did was I took my weekly review and I broke it into two pieces and my midweek review that I now do on Tuesdays includes a different set of tasks that used to kind of make the weekly review process way too cumbersome.

And I decided to do them in two pieces is a lot more logical and effective.

So let's get specific here.

The midweek review for me now includes three areas, tech updates, health and fitness updates, and inbox management.

So for tech updates, I'm going to do things like reboot my computers, run software updates, backup my computers and my iPhone, run some software to help clean up some old stuff that I have running specifically.

That's the clean my Mac software.

If you use a Mac, that software is awesome.

Super great.

Clean my Mac.

Fantastic software.

I run that once a week as well.

I also charge battery powered devices or anything that really needs to be zapped up for the coming week.

So this is big tech update thing that I do because I'm basically running a tech company here and everything I do is highly technical all the time.

I need my tech to work in a very effective way.

I need to rely on this stuff and for it to be optimized.

I want to make sure it runs really smoothly.

So at least once a week, I go through this process to make sure everything is up to date in these ways and a few others as well.

The second area are my health and fitness updates.

This will include things like restocking my gym bag with granola bars, or in my case, I also use some salt packets in the sauna.

So I restocked the gym bag with my supplies for the upcoming week.

I'll also check my household supply stock levels.

This sounds really nerdy, but this is where I'll do things like I'll check my, how much deodorant do I have or laundry detergent or paper towels.

I literally have this mapped out once a week to review my household items to make sure I have what I need.

Now at this point, you've I probably lost you as a listener.

You probably think I'm so a little over the top here, but let me just tell you, once you get to a point where you realize the value of a checklist, your brain will explode.

This is going to be life changing.

I say this from the perspective, not that I want to nerd out on all of this all the time, but the effectiveness of this stuff is so real.

When you have the experience in the opposite direction, you run out of something and it bothers you.

What do you do?

Right?

Do you complain about it?

Probably.

Do you solve the problem in the moment?

Yeah, because you need more deodorant or whatever.

But the third area, do you prevent the problem from happening again?

This is where a checklist comes in and solves the problem.

This is the most magical thing in the world.

If you get to a point in your life where you have the level of self-awareness to say, here's a problem that I've had before that I've solved before, but never prevented before, bring in a checklist, right?

Do the thing that needs to be done to make sure you don't have the problem again.

I have not run out of deodorant in years.

I always have enough because I'm always checking the supply levels on a recurring basis and I'm good there.

Not that I ever needed to smell fantastic, but I don't smell bad in case you were wondering.

Um, and because of these things, right?

Because it's built in.

So a health and fitness update compared or I guess combined with a household management strategy, all of these things can pair well together with a solid checklist that says the things that matter to me are managed.

The things that I don't want to screw up.

There's a checklist for that.

And here's the solution and I don't have to think about it or worry about it because the checklist has it managed.

That's it.

That's all we're talking about.

All right.

I lost you as a listener.

Hope you're back and still with me.

All right.

The third and final component of the midweek review is where we empty our inboxes.

Now for me, that's going to be things like my digital task manager knows be, I have what I call a Q2 category.

This is once again, very specific here.

The Q2 category quadrant two comes from the Stephen Covey four quadrants.

Q2 stands for importance, but not urgent.

So for me and my task manager, any random ideas that I get that I think are awesome, but are not time bound.

It's a good idea for later.

I will give it a category of Q2 and I'll ignore it, but at least once a week I will look through that list and ask the question, what am I going to do with this idea?

Am I going to actually schedule it and take care of it?

Will I delete it because the idea actually isn't that good?

Will I, you know, put it on a project list to do later?

Like I'm going to process the idea.

And the goal of emptying an inbox is to look through any of your inboxes could be physical mail, email, a digital notebook, task manager, calendar ideas, random post-it notes around your house, right?

We're asking the question, where does information end up?

And then can you process that and do something with it?

So at least once a week, I need those ideas to be consolidated and processed.

And so all of this, the tech updates, the health and fitness updates, the inbox management, none of these things would be good to do during the weekly review because they're all going to distract me from what the weekly review is asking me to do, which is to review what happened last week and optimize next week.

The rest of this stuff I just mentioned, the midweek review, it's just maintenance, right?

It's just basic maintenance to keep my life functioning.

This can be done anytime.

In fact, you could argue these things can be done once a month, which brings me to my next area.

So I have a few other review processes.

Weekly review.

Yes, we've covered that a lot.

Midweek review.

Very helpful.

There's also a monthly review, a mid month review, a quarterly review and an annual review.

Yes, I love checklists.

I love reviews.

I've got a ton of them, but they all have their own independent value.

And so let's go to those monthly and mid month reviews real fast.

The monthly review is going to be basically the same as quarterly and annually.

They're all kind of the same vibe here, which is that they're all asking the question, what happened in this last time period and what's the big objective for the next one?

Not real specific, but more along the lines of like, am I living the life I want to live?

Yes or no.

If I could change something significant for the next month, the next quarter, the next year, what would that big thing be?

This is way bigger vision casting going on in the bigger reviews.

And those kinds of questions are very important to ask on a recurring basis.

You don't have to do it as often as I do it here, but you can do this on a system that works for you to at least guarantee you're asking these questions fairly regularly.

So that's the bigger picture.

Now the mid month review is going to correlate very similarly to my mid week review, which is more of the tech and website updates that I do for my business, financial updates, and really any random miscellaneous tasks that need to be reviewed on a monthly basis.

I will do on that list there.

And one thing you'll notice if you get really into checklists is that you will add to these things a lot.

You'll get ideas all the time of saying, Oh, wait a minute.

This thing that I always forget to do, this would fit really well on this review list on this checklist.

And then you'll add it in and you'll update it and evolve it and, and tweak it and optimize it.

Like that's why this is version 5.0 of my review system is because this has been changing and evolving for years.

And I continue to do so all the time.

And so no matter how many checklists you may end up with, you're going to want to improve them and you're going to want to add to them and tweak them and have the right links and the right reminders and the right places, the right times for all the right reasons.

And when that's in place, you're going to feel so much more pulled together in areas that may previously seem like it was a big hot mess.

All right, now let's wrap this whole thing up with what has changed to make this version 5.0 of my reviews.

There are three key areas here that I have shifted to all three of which I've already discussed, but now we'll be more specific.

The first is I moved my reviews back to Fridays.

So as I said before, I used to do reviews on Sunday afternoons, but because of my girls at home, I'm just too distracted on the weekends at home to do anything with my business.

So I just don't.

And what I do is on Friday afternoon at 1 PM, I do the review and it generally takes about, like I said, one and a half to two hours, which is perfect because I have to leave later in the afternoon to get my daughter from daycare.

So I have a time bound review system.

So I'm basically forced to get it done in that time.

And I do, and it works out really well, but also frees up time for me to be available to my family on the weekends.

And it forces me to end my week to plan for the next week.

So I know that Friday afternoon is already taken.

I'm not going to schedule meetings, no projects, nothing.

It is the review end of story.

And this guarantees time for it and ensures that this will always happen.

Then the only exception to that would be if I'm traveling, but if that's the case, I just simply reschedule the review and I still get it done.

Even if the whole week was a vacation, that's how important these things are to me.

All right.

Number two for the big changes in version 5.0 is I actually moved, like I said before, many of my tasks from the review to the mid week review.

And so that would include kind of the smaller stuff, right?

The weekly review is my big stuff, big wins from last week and big goals for next.

But the midweek review are the smaller things, the smaller tech updates, the health and fitness restocking, the inbox management.

And so you're kind of asking the question, where do these things belong?

Because everything belongs somewhere.

There's going to be a good time to do big picture stuff and a good time for little details.

And so all you're doing is kind of consolidating these things and putting them in the right buckets.

And if you have that organized well, that's gonna be a lot easier for it to know where new ideas should end up.

And that'll be a lot more helpful.

And the third and final big change that I made for version 5.0 was this massive focus on checklists, right?

This thing I nerd out about all the time.

Yes, it includes all of those review systems.

It includes my podcast production batching week.

It also includes a new one I just made last week that I call my blood donation checklist.

That's right.

So I give blood on a regular basis, or at least I should do it more often.

And one thing I just did recently was I donated blood and the process didn't go as fluidly as I wanted to.

That's a good pun.

I didn't go as well as I wanted it to.

And so what I decided to do is make a checklist to make sure I was prepared ahead of time before the donation, but I knew what to do the day of and the recovery afterwards, because to donate blood is to lose literally a pint of blood from your body.

You're going to need a preparation in terms of hydration and blood sugar.

And then you're going to have a bit of a, of a crash after you donate.

And so you have some recovery time afterwards to rest and prepare your body to then recover.

Well, well, for all of this to be true, I wanted a solid checklist to make sure I could donate properly in the future.

So I've got an entire Google doc associated with this, with a reminder system in nose B.

So I know when it pops up, how to do what needs to be done.

It's right there.

I've thought it through.

It's it's a checklist and it works.

That's what this is.

It's how awesome these things could be is that anything you're going to do on a recurring basis that matters to you, make a checklist, follow it.

Good to go.

So in a nutshell, that's the weekly review 5.0.

That's the massive changes.

That's the, the focus that I have on streamlining my systems for long-term success is to make sure I have what I need, when I need it, where I need it, and for the right reasons.

And all of that is possible.

If you review your life on a regular basis and you have the tools and resources and checklists to organize what's there in an effective way, I've been doing this for a long time.

And so if this sounds overwhelming, it probably is if you take it all in at once.

So just take this step by step, start with, I don't know, a checklist and just write down a few things you want to do.

Yes, of course, once again, you can download the free version of my template to help get you started.

Jeff Sanders.com/5am club.

If you have any questions about your review process or clarification on what I discussed today, go ahead and email me, Jeff@jeffsanders.com.

And for the action step this week, implement or update your own weekly review process.

However you choose to review your life, business, projects, and goals, just make sure you have an intentional process.

My review system has evolved over the years, but it's never ceased to be indispensable to my productive flow.

My review is one of the few tasks I never miss, no matter how busy I am, where I'm traveling, how I feel or what I would rather be doing.

It is that important.

Now be sure to subscribe to this podcast and your favorite podcast app or become a VIP member of the 5am Miracle community by getting the premium ad free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5am Miracle premium.com.

And that's all I've got for you here on the 5am Miracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and the fun begins bright and early.

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