Do you keep a work journal?

One of the best ways to improve at your job is to take a step back. Far too often, we wait until we reach some kind of crisis mode to make time to do this. Maybe we’re feeling burnt out, an important task falls through the cracks, or there’s an outburst of emotion that we aren’t proud of. Smaller, more incremental reflection often helps prevent blow ups by giving us a chance to right the ship when our work is not sustainable.

At the end of every week, take a quick inventory of your work. I set a timer for 15 minutes. I’ll pull up my calendar or look in my sent mail folder or recent documents that I touched to jog my memory of what I did this week. Then I see if I can quickly summarize what I did and why.

Where did you spend your time?

Don’t just list your meetings. For each meeting, think about whether it was a good use of your time. Can you summarize what you got out of the meeting in one or two lines? If not, it’s probably time to reflect. Can you use the meeting better? Maybe set an agenda? Could you reduce the length or frequency of the meeting? Or maybe cancel it?

I don’t subscribe to the “cancel all meetings” philosophy. There are a lot of meetings that could have been an email, sure, but I’ve also seen a lot of key results that could have been higher if folks had talked to each other more often. Before scrapping them, think about what could make them more useful for everyone involved.

What did you accomplish?

Did you make progress on your most important goals? Did you spend too much time fighting fires? Maybe you closed a deal, shipped a new feature, or published a new newsletter.

I find it’s really important to keep track of your small wins week to week, especially when you’re working towards a large or ambitious goal. There have been times when I’ve made it to the end of the week thinking, “What do I even do here?” only to start writing everything down and realizing, “Oh. I actually do a lot.”

Did you get time for your deep creative work?

Even in your busiest weeks, make sure you’re protecting at least a few continuous hours on your calendar to process everything you’ve been taking in. In any job, you need time for creative, deep-thinking. Set up a few hours to auto-decline meetings on your calendar and just give yourself space to think and solve the problems in front of you. Use this time to take in all of the new information you’ve learned and apply it to the problems you’re trying to solve.

How’s your energy?

I’ve also made it to the end of a week feeling completely bewildered as to why I’m so tired. When I do my weekly reflection, it’s usually an “ah ha” moment. It normally means I did too much of the kind of work that I find particularly draining that week. Where possible, I then flip to my calendar for the next week to see if I can reduce that kind of work to allow myself to recover a bit. Maybe I need to do less firefighting, less peacekeeping, or less administrative work. Sometimes that means delaying or delegating work that’s in those categories. Other times it means booking vacation time.

How’s the bigger picture looking?

Set yourself a reminder at the end of every month to flip back through a few weeks. What patterns do you notice? What’s stalling out? What do you need out of your career that you’re not currently getting? If you feel like you’re quite happy with the way things are going, what do you need to do to be able to maintain that? What do you need to do less of?

All in all, this takes me about 30 minutes each week, but it pays dividends in my focus. I also find it’s the best way to get my brain to put all the “work problems” down for the weekend. When I’m walking through the park with my family, I’d rather be focused on that. If I haven’t wrapped up for the week, my brain will start wandering to that nagging work problem instead of deciding what kind of donut to split with my daughter.

On weeks that I skip the reflection, I feel it starting to compound in the following weeks. If I miss too many in a row, I’ll take an afternoon to get caught up and reset. It always works better when I’m consistent about it, but life sometimes gets in the way. 100% is the wrong target for nearly everything. Give yourself some grace if you miss occasionally.

Happy reflecting.