Build Your Weekly Review

Tl;dr - A weekly review clears mental clutter, sharpens your focus on what matters and gives your subconscious clear marching orders. This post will help you build one.

NOTE - the Tacklebox Slack will have this review sent automatically on Sundays. Members will be invited, non-members interested, email team@gettacklebox.com

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I got (way too) deep in the coffee world while I was recovering from a torn achilles last year.

I now get irrationally excited when this guy or this guy puts out a new video, I know what TDS my tap water is, and I’m currently working on a coffee truck concept that’ll sit at train station parking lots from 6-8am (pod series coming on that soon). When friends and family come over I make them a coffee using the Tetsu 4:6 method and talk about where the beans are from and how they’re processed and they nod and smile and wish they’d gotten Starbucks on the way over.

The downside to the hobby is the maintenance. There’s more to clean, more to store, more to think about, and the whole process just takes longer. I’ve built systems for it, but the systems require maintenance, too. It’s a lot of effort.

Friends are confused - why not just get an automatic coffee maker or go to a coffee shop?

The answer is that I want a different sort of result than either of those. And anything with higher than normal performance will require higher than normal maintenance. It’s a non-negotiable tradeoff. Interesting stuff requires maintenance.

Segway!

Ferraris and Cockroaches

When you start working on a startup you add something roughly 20x more nuanced and finicky and emotionally draining than shifting a coffee routine. It’s interesting. So it requires maintenance.

And, unlike with coffee, the maintenance needed isn’t obvious. I can see if there’s residue on my Kalita Wave, but I can’t always notice the stressors building up as I send cold emails or look at competitors or try to build a Concierge MVP or ignore going to speak to customers at a conference.

My late mother-in-law used to talk about Ferraris and cockroaches. She said most people treated themselves like cockroaches, assuming they could get away with it. She always pushed people to treat themselves like Ferrari’s. You wouldn’t put cheap gas in a Ferrari, so don’t put poor inputs into your life. A Ferrari requires maintenance.

The best way to do this is a Weekly Review.

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The Weekly Review

The phrase “Weekly Review” is about as approachable as a “casual, sophisticated chic” dress code is at a wedding, which is why you (and most people) don’t stick to one, even though you know you should. You probably beat yourself up about it, too.

The reason weekly reviews are intimidating is because it isn’t clear what they’re not: a weekly overhaul of your big, long-term strategy. If you’re trying to re-align your vision statement each Sunday, you’ll never get anywhere and burn yourself out.

A good weekly review closes the previous week and preps the upcoming week without being something you dread. It’s a light clearing of the deck that frees your mind up to be creative.

My Weekly Review is inspired by the two internal systems I’ve used over the past decade - Getting Things Done and PARA. It takes me less than 30 minutes every Sunday, but is the most important 30 minutes of my week. When I do it consistently, things hum and my mind is clear. When I don’t, my life gets bloated and unfocused.

The high-level framework I use is from GTD:

1. Get Clear

2. Get Current

3. Get Creative

Here’s the actual process:

1. Get Clear - 10 min

   1. Clear Your Physical Space: My desk gets messy, so I clean it. It’s a super easy and rewarding way to start the review.

   2. Clear Your Mental Space: In the words of David Allen, I “empty my head.” I write, in long-form sentences, for ~7 minutes. I write about new ideas for the business, what worked well the previous week - really, whatever’s on my mind. Sometimes these are new tasks I need to create, but usually it’s just a check in. This is the most important part of the review. Try it and you’ll see why.
      

2. Get Current - 10 min

   1. Email Clean: Email is always the bottleneck, and it requires the most maintenance.
      
      The goal of the Email Review is not to answer every email - it’s just to decide what action is needed for each email. Does an email require a response? Should it be saved for reference?
      
      You’ll need some sort of filtering system here - I keep my tasks in Notion, and I have a keyboard shortcut for creating a new task.
      
      My workflow: copy the email URL → create new Notion task via keyboard shortcut → paste URL into task → label with action needed (e.g., 'to respond')."
      
      Sometimes there’s an email I need to answer right away, but usually I just add them to tasks and handle them when necessary. Also, if an email will take less than 2 minutes, I do it. Not worth making a task for that.

   2. Projects Review: What are the big projects you’re currently tackling? What’s up next? All still relevant? I look through the big projects and just catch up with where I’m at on each.

   3. Tasks Review: Same for tasks. I catch up and clean out any that are no longer relevant. If something critical slipped through, I do it immediately.

   4. Calendar Review: I make sure I’ve got time scheduled during the next week for the most important stuff. Some of this will be surfaced in the next section. If there isn’t time for strategic work, I see what I can move to make way for it. I like to have at least one block of 3-4 hours per day of “deep work.”
      

3. Get Creative - 10 min

   Here’s where I push myself a bit with a few exercises:
   

   1. To-Do List Monster: Look at your list of tasks / projects. Is there anything ambitious or unique that you could do to make all those tasks irrelevant?
      
      For example, I currently have a bunch of tasks related to getting a license for a food truck. They’ll take months. What might I do to make those irrelevant?
      
      I could buy an existing food truck that already has all the approvals, or I could partner with an existing restaurant that’s got 85% of them. Maybe worth exploring.

   2. Uncomfortable Next Week: What am I doing next week that makes me uncomfortable? What am I most nervous for? If nothing… what would make me nervous that I can block time for? Make sure the calendar is set up for it.

   3. Be Me, But Moreso: What do I do better than everyone else? How am I doing that next week?

   4. Bonus question (rotating, in Slack): I’ve got a bank of ~50 questions I love. One will be sent each week over Slack. I cycle through them weekly.

I’ve got a printable version that I keep on my desk - for some reason that makes it feel more “official.” Also, I set a timer for 30 minutes and really try to finish in that time.

I log each of these in Notion and can theoretically go back and look at them, but I rarely do. Occasionally at the end of the year I will.

Ok - now it’s up to you. Make a weekly review and stick to it for a few weeks. Slack will help. I’m also considering doing these over Zoom with folks as a little “virtual coworking” thing. Email me if that’d be useful.