The Best Day for Your Weekly Review
By: Steven Michels
Tags: Work, Productivity, Effectiveness, Work Life Balance, Gtd

One of the most basic decisions you have to make about your productivity plan, other than the perennial paper, digital, or paper and digital, is when to do your weekly review — with Fridays, being the most obvious and perhaps most common choice.

I’d like to make a case for a time I’ve recently discovered: Thursday afternoons. It solves some issues I’ve experienced with doing a review on other days, and it’s proven to be effective in ways that I didn’t anticipate.

For the longest time, I had been doing a review of projects and tasks on Saturday morning. I was typically too tired on Fridays, and I wanted to give myself some space to reflect on the week before previewing what should come next.

But I noticed that the Saturday review was taking too long, simply because I usually have a lot of time. (The same could be said for Sunday night, which I never really considered.) There was something very enjoyable about going over the previous and next week, while leisurely listening to music and working my way through a pot of coffee. Pleasurable, yes — but not very effective.

Then I moved to Friday afternoon, forcing myself to make time for it, even if it meant staying at work into the evening. That left Saturday morning free, unless there was a Friday project that I had to get out the door, or if I had to be away from my desk for an extended period of time for whatever reason.

I’ve heard that some people prefer Monday mornings, but starting the week without a plan seems terribly ineffective, unless your business regularly has significant developments that arise over the weekend. I’m also guessing the uncertainly of a Monday (or Sunday) review could hang over the weekend.

The Monday review also seems like a waste of good energy, assuming that you start the day and the week well-rested and ready to go. The thought of dedicating the best part of the week to updating lists and moving files around makes me nauseous. You should want to walk into work on Monday and start working immediately on your most important task.

The same cautions against reviews on Monday mornings could be said for team meetings. If I had a team that I trusted to do good work, I would want to stay out of their way on Monday and check in on them later in the day or in the week, when my guidance would not interfere with their focus. I would wager that anyone who prefers Monday morning meetings must not have enough to do.

Staying away from Saturday and Sunday means that I’m more likely to adhere to the 36-hour digital detox (of email and social media, from Fridays at 6pm till Sundays at noon), which I’ve come to find great pleasure in.

Really, making a plan to schedule work-related things during the weekend should be avoided at all costs. Carving out and protecting free time and time to clear your head is essential to sustainable productivity and happiness. If you plan a weekly review on a Saturday or Sunday, you are greatly reducing the distance you sometimes need for higher-level reflection, especially for monthly, quarterly, or yearly reviews, which make more sense to schedule over the weekend or even while you’re on vacation.

All in all, the Friday review has worked fine enough, if only because I didn’t think there was a better way.

For the last few months, however, I’d noticed that I had been giving the Friday review more time that it warranted, which was interfering with getting other things off of my plate. The review is a practice that I take great delight in, and I want to get to it as quickly as possible to clean up my life and track the progress I’ve made on projects. Sometimes I found myself doing nothing other than the review after returning from lunch. In short, the review was making Fridays much less productive than they could have been.

I stumbled across a Thursday practice during a rather productive and easy week, when I accomplished all of my small tasks and made good headway on larger projects. That Thursday afternoon, I was looking at my Friday schedule and noticed that the weekly review was the only major item on my calendar. It didn’t take me long to reflect on what I’ve done and set up my calendar and tasks for the next week. The review was done.

What I didn’t anticipate and where the realization came to me was what happened on Friday: it was an incredibly productive day. When I got to my desk, I realized that there were quite a few small tasks for the next week I had to take care of, which I quickly dispensed with. Then I started on two other larger and related tasks, before heading to the gym for lunch and returning to make some more progress. I even had enough energy from these easy wins to take care of an important but not urgent task I have had on the back-burner for months.

Needless to say, it was the most productive week and the most productive Friday I have ever had, and there was quite a skip in my step as I walked to my car. Rather than letting half the day be consumed by doing an extended weekly review, I spent nearly all of the day getting a head start on the next week. I felt like I had magically added days to the week.

In addition to ending the week on a high note and leaving myself task-free for the weekend, a Thursday review has meant that I have room to add things to my schedule early in the week, which invariably happens, especially Monday afternoons, when I have a regular 1 on 1 with my boss.

Of course whatever works for you is what you should do. And this will certainly vary, if you have an atypical work week. But if you are not satisfied with your current set-up and haven’t tried Thursday afternoons, I think it’s well worth a shot.