1 | 11 | Create additional Routine Review checklists

Hi there! I'm Marian Knopp, the Online Business Systemizer at marianknopp.com.

The Productivity Tip of the Day™ is: Create additional Routine Review checklists

Yesterday I talked about the daily review checklist, but that's not the only routine checklist that you should have. You should also have checklists for other routine activities that you have, like the weekly review. That's a very popular one. Getting Things Done really popularized that. A lot of people have a weekly review practice that they do at the end of the week, maybe on Friday, or a lot of people like Sunday evenings before they go in to work, or maybe they do it Monday morning, whatever works for you.

But also take it to the next step and do a monthly review. And if you have the activities that necessitate it, you can also do a quarterly review and an annual review.

I want to share some of the things that you'll want to include on those types of reviews.

For the weekly review, you're going to start it off just like you would a daily review. Same thing for a monthly review, where you're going to be looking at your calendar. This is where you start planning out your time in the future. For the weekly review, I take a look at what I did the past week and just make sure that everything is tied up, and if there's something that I should change about my routine schedule for the future, I can look at how that has fluctuated in the past week. And then I'll look at the next two weeks coming up so that I can plan ahead.

For the monthly review, I'm doing the same thing except I'm going the next two months out. That is how I do that. I don't do any calendar tasks for quarterly or annually, but for the weekly and monthly that keeps me on track and keeps my calendar up to date far enough out that people who need to schedule things with me are able to see the availability that they need for the weeks and months ahead of time.

But then you're going into inboxes that you don't need to check as often. Maybe you only need to check certain things on a weekly or monthly basis. I've just been changing over my email inboxes so I actually have several that I need to check, but some are not as filled as others. One of my really old email addresses, I only check once a month to see if there's anything that is still lingering there before I can close it out. If you have inboxes that maybe you don't need to check on a regular basis. Another inbox for me is my post office box. I just don't get that much mail. I only check it once a week. Sometimes just two or three times a month depending on if I'm driving by there.

Take a look at the inboxes that maybe you don't need to have eyes on every day and you can tell when you're checking it daily if you don't really see anything new or noteworthy that is useful for your attention that frequently. You could simply take that line from the daily review checklist and move it to a weekly or monthly review accordingly.

But then there are also tasks that I like to throw into the weekly review and the monthly review. Whereas daily review is often centered around getting to inbox zero and it's a lot of clearing out of the notifications that have popped up in my life. The weekly review or monthly review helped me corral all of those routine tasks that I want to do all at once. For finances, checking your books, going through your budget, making sure that your bank statement is reconciled. All of those kinds of things can go into your weekly or monthly review.

Also planning out your tasks for the week ahead. Just like I'm looking at my calendar, I'm also looking at my task management workflow and making sure that it has been planned out well in advance and all sorts of other things. ​

I used to be addicted to Pinterest. I don't know if anyone's a fan of Pinterest, but I loved Pinterest. For years I would check Pinterest every day. I just loved it so much. It was so inspirational for me, but I don't do that anymore because obviously it's not a good use of my time, but I still like to indulge every now and then. I put it on a routine review so that I won't check it every day and I know that I'll get to it eventually.

Same thing for my RSS feed. This is just a way for me to corral content consumption, which can definitely be a time suck, especially in your main working days. For example, I work pretty steadily Monday through Friday and a little bit on the weekends. But in order for me to prevent myself from getting distracted with content consumption or going down a social media platform feed that isn't at all relevant to what I need to do, I just put it on a list that is less frequent. I still get to have that in my life. It just is a way for me to manage those distractions.

That's something for you guys to try out as well. If maybe you don't need to use a certain social media platform for your business like Snapchat, but you still want to be tuned in or something of that nature. Really it's up to you to brain dump all of those routine tasks.

Another idea that I would have for you is to look at the projects that you are currently pursuing and look at those next actions and see if there are tasks that you could actually add to your routine in order to help you get to your goal faster. For example, I am producing content on a daily basis. I can plan all of that out and schedule it out on a weekly basis though. Obviously, these are done live, so this is on my daily review list. But for a weekly or monthly routine, you can actually schedule things ahead of time and that will provide you with the opportunity to get something done that moves your project forward, especially for those long-term projects that are going to take a while. Adding those next actions into some routine checklist will help you make incremental progress forward.

All right, that's all I had for additional routine reviews. Please take some time for yourself and see if you can develop your own weekly review checklist, your monthly review checklist. Everybody's will be different based on what your priorities are and what you use. Now that we've created all of these parts for your productivity workflow, with the project brainstorming we did, the next actions plan for those projects, setting up your calendar and now we've got these routine checklists. It's time to put all of this together into a task management workflow so that you can execute every single day and start to get things done if you haven't already made that leap.

Stay tuned for that tip tomorrow.

See you tomorrow!