My 30 Minute Weekly Preview & Review Plan

Everyone, my name is Matt, and welcome to a new episode of Connect the Dots. I'm so excited to share this episode with you because I'm going to be talking about something that is very near and dear to my heart, something that is a real productivity multiplier because of the power that it has to focus your energy, your attention, and your work on the things that matter. Of course, I'm talking about the weekly review and preview that I do every single week. Takes me just 30 minutes combined. I do them separately, and I'm going to tell you exactly what they are. Here we go. One last thing before we get started is if you go to 3, that's the number 3 keys, like carkeys.fyi, you're going to get my, like, 3 keys worksheet. And one of the things that we're going to talk about, that you're going to learn about, is this Weekly Preview and Review System. So, if you want a worksheet, kind of a workbook about this, if you want an extra video that I haven't shared anywhere else about how to implement these 3 keys of productivity in your life, go to 3keys.fyi. There's going to be a link in the description and in the show notes for this. Check it out there and you will get hooked up. I made the bold proclamation at the beginning of this that a proper Weekly Preview and Review is a true force multiplier in your work. The reason is because when you're doing a proper, for you, a proper preview and review of the week, you're gaining a level of awareness and clarity and confidence about the work that you're doing that helps make everything else a lot smoother and easier to do. It really is when you think about the outsized impact that this 30 minutes of planning can have on your your week, it really is wild to think about. So if you ever get yourself stuck thinking, even right at the beginning of this video, if you're like, "Matt, I don't have time to do like this whole big, you know, 2-hour weekly review or preview." Number 1, I'm not asking you to commit that amount of time if you felt like that's the amount of time that it takes, or maybe you've seen other productivity people tell you that like, "Well, I do this weekly preview and review and it takes all this time." I'm going to show you a really simple way to get, like, kind of that 80/20 effect. You do, like, this— you do this preview and review, and you will get a lot of the benefits whilst not putting in a bunch of work or time. Since this is coming out on a Monday— maybe I'll put it out on a Sunday— but since this is coming out at the beginning of the week, let's go ahead and start with the Weekly Preview. And what I want you to do is just take out your Bullet Journal, take out a sheet of paper. You can open up your app. And what I want, what I want you to do is take out your Bullet Journal, take out your notebook, your planner, your app of choice, or whatever you want to do, and you are going to write down GAP, G-A-P, and that stands for Goals, Actions, and Plan. Now, the way that I preview my week is following this really simple acronym. And what I'm asking myself at the beginning of the week, what are my goals? What are the things that I know I want to get done this week to move my business forward, to make sure that I'm making the connections and the content that I want? So I'm going to usually set aside, try and plan for 2 or 3 primary goals, could be more, could be less, that I know that I want to get done this week. All right, so now that I have my goals, That's it. This is really simple. Now that I have my goals, I'm going to write down what are the related action steps or tasks that I need to complete to make sure that I complete my goal, that I achieve my goal, that I finish the thing that I say is really important to me. And a key distinction I will say about these goals that I'm setting at the beginning of the week is oftentimes they are outcome based goals. Okay, so they're things that if I put in the work and I follow the steps and I complete the task, they're going to get done. I'm not necessarily putting in a goal like have my new YouTube video hit 10,000 views within the first week. That is nice, but that is not something that I control. What I control is publishing the video. Okay, so if my big goal for the week is to publish a new YouTube video, then that's going to go in and I'm going to start listing the action tasks, the action steps for completing and publishing a new YouTube video. So, now that I've got my goal and I have set out the action steps for it, now I need to look at the week ahead, the calendar, you know, Google Calendar or Woven. I use Woven, love Woven. And I'm looking at it and saying like, okay, for the amount of time that I usually know that a YouTube video takes for me to make, where can I plan and protect that time in my week to make sure that it gets done? Because if I don't schedule it into my week, if I don't plan for it and really protect that time, then often it doesn't actually get done because, you know, other things come in, I don't maybe think about it as much, I might get a call scheduled, all kinds of things can happen. So I'm setting my goal, I'm defining the action steps, and then I'm planning and protecting that time in my week. That is how I preview my week with the GAP method: Goals, Actions, Plan. One little extra addition that I want to make to GAPs is like the little S of systems. Now, we've talked in different shows and episodes about the, like, the difference between system goals and outcome goals. And every single week, I know that I have different system goals in place, like record the podcast, record a new YouTube video, which I also mentioned mentioned as an outcome goal. But I need to make sure that things that I've already committed myself to, I need to make sure that my outcome-based goals that I'm setting are not taking over too much time that I've already committed to, like ongoing systems and things that I'm just already going to be committed to. So I like, sometimes I'll include that, sometimes I won't. But if I notice, the reason that I put that in there is because if you notice over the course of 3 or 4 weeks of doing a weekly preview that you get into the weekly review, which we'll talk about next, and like, ah, I only did one of my goals this week, I only got 2 of the 4 done, then it's most likely the case that you're spending a lot of time in like things that you're already committed to. And when you're doing things that you're already committed to, it doesn't leave as much time for extra, for these extra goals, like these additional things that you want to add on to your schedule. So just keep that in mind. And as you're going through the review process, if you're like, I didn't do as much of that thing as I intended to, then it's probably because you have a lot of preexisting commitments that take up a lot of your time. Specifically, I know that's the case for me. Like when I factor in daily emails, a weekly YouTube video, a weekly podcast, coaching that I do, then that's about 70 to 80% of my week that is already taken up. And if I add in another 10 to 15% of my time is taken up in admin, then all of a sudden, for these like more outcome-based goals, like I want to record new videos for the course, or I need to like write new lessons for the course, I want to plan for a notebook that I might release in the future, I may only have like 5 to 10 hours per week, if that, at the most, to work on these like additional new goals that I may have like set out for myself. So it's really important to have an awareness of your time, and that is something that we get to in the weekly review section. So I've set up my gap preview, and I'm going through the week, and I am checking in on myself, kind of doing like a mini a mini review every single day, like looking at it and saying like, okay, I have this goal that I wanted to write 2 new lessons for my course this week. It's Monday, it's Tuesday, I've gone by, I haven't gotten them done. Do I have some time that I can get them done on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday? Again, kind of maybe pivoting and planning that time a little bit differently, but I'm consistently checking in with myself a couple of times a day to do like a little mini preview and a little mini review just to make sure that I'm staying on task and staying on track. Now, when I get to Friday, usually Friday afternoon, sometimes I might do it over the weekend, but my, my intention is to do my weekly review on Friday afternoon. Everything is still fresh from the week. I have that time protected. It doesn't take away from any time that I have with my family at that point. Obviously, that's really important to me. And when I'm doing my weekly review, I follow a simple acronym and a style prompt for it as well. And that is WARPP, W-A-R-P, and that stands for Wins, Aspirations, Results, and Pivots. So let's go ahead and break down each of those. The win is very simple. It's just asking myself, going back, reviewing the week, and asking myself, what were the wins? What were the things that went well? And I try and be very mindful of anything that has gone well, because it's easy to look at your business, it's easy to look at your content on your channel and be like, I wish it was doing better. I wish that, you know, I was able to go viral or blow up. And you sometimes miss, I often miss, like, hey, I put a new video out this week. That's really cool. I made a new podcast this week. I wrote an email every single day. Like, those are all wins. I got this really nice email response from Sarah and one from Patrick and one from Michael and one from Michelle. So thank you. And also from Tammy. Thank you so much for, like, that feels really cool to get those wins of just people responding and saying like, hey, I'm really liking what you're doing. Those are all wins, and I'm trying to do a better job of recognizing those. The A part is for aspirations, and those aspirations are kind of, again, reviewing back and being like, what did Monday Matt aspire to do? Like, looking at that, those goals specifically. Okay, so I'm looking at those and be like, Matt intended, he aspired to do these 3 or 4 goals, and they had these tasks and he was going to do it. On these days. So it's really just looking back almost like a reporter instead of a judge and being like, excuse me, what did, I'm here, this is Friday Matt and this is Review Ragland and I'm asking Monday Matt, you know, what did you intend to do on Monday? He's like, oh, I was totally gonna do this, this, and this. And Review Ragland is like, mm-hmm, sure, okay, cool. You did all those things, didn't quite do this thing. So I'm just, I'm approaching it more as a reporter. Now, what I'm doing on the back end of that, so I'm getting my kind of aspirational goals written down, and then I'm looking at what were the results. Was I able to complete, complete or finish the goals that I had set for myself? Did I get like 75% of the way there? And, you know, maybe I can still knock it out by the end of the week, or maybe it's just the first thing that I focus on Monday morning coming up. Okay, the important part for each of these, because aspirations, results, and pitfalls, pivots all work together really closely. And I want to keep hammering in this idea that when you're doing a review specifically, you want to approach it more like a reporter than a judge. You are not giving yourself a hard time in the review, okay? At least I'm not. That's not what it's for. It's for me to kind of report, review, reflect as an objective observer, a third party, and be like, okay, this is what Monday Matt aspired to do, these were the results, and based on those aspirations and results, here's how we're gonna pivot in the week ahead. This thing that was a big goal, you said was a big goal on Monday, as the week has gone on, it's become clear that it's not as big of a goal anymore. You don't have to keep going on that. 75, 80% complete is going to be okay. Or I can also look at it and say like, all right, we're going to pivot next week a little bit. We weren't really intending for this thing to drag on from one week to another, but there's like this extra 10 to 20%, a couple of extra tasks that need to get done in order for it to be like just complete or as good. As I want it to be. And so after I look at the wins, I'm looking at what were the aspirations, what were the results of those aspirational goals, and then do I need to make any pivots in the week ahead. So now that I have that WARP review, you can start to see how these two things start to play together. Because once I have, you know, the results and the pivots from my weekly review, I I can go into the next week's preview and start to ask myself like, okay, so now that I have this information, I have this information now from Review Ragland, the reporter reviewer Ragland, that's too many Rs. But now that I have this from him, I can look at it and say like, okay, maybe I was a little, maybe I was a little too aggressive last week. That's okay, let's pull back a little bit. Maybe I'm just going to focus on 1, maybe 2 aspirational goals that I want to get done this week. So, I can pull back a little bit. I can kind of restructure my week ahead based on the results that I reviewed in the past week. And then the cycle just starts over again. So, okay, it's week 2 of doing my GAP Preview. What are my goals? What are the action steps? What, when am I going to plan to get these things done? And then, you know, I get to the following Friday, and I'm reviewing, I'm reporting, like, okay, these were the wins. Hey, everything that Monday Matt aspired to do, it looks like the results all line up. These things all fit, you were able to get all these things done. Maybe the pivot is like, okay, I tried to do 3 or 4 things in week 4, and I didn't get them all done, but then in week 2, I only did 1, maybe 2. And so there's a nice little middle. Like, do 2 big things, maybe a third smaller thing. But it's as I'm doing this, like, making a plan, giving it a preview, giving the week a preview, setting those goals, those actions, those plans, and then coming back and being an objective and a reporter of the week, being like, what were my wins, what were my aspirations, what were the results of those aspirations, and then where do I pivot going into the next week. You see how they really work together to be really effective. Now, for me personally, I do all of my planning and previewing in the Bullet Journal. At least that's the very first draft. That's where all the brainstorming happens, that's where the planning happens. In my weekly preview spread, I'm looking at it ahead of time and saying like, Here is my goal, here are the action steps for the goal, and then what I'm doing since I pre-format my daily logs in the Bullet Journal a couple of weeks ahead of time, then I can look at it and say, okay, I'm going to block out some time on Tuesday to work on this YouTube video, or I'm going to block out some time on Wednesday morning to make sure that I'm writing those new lessons for the course. And from that, so all of the planning, all the Gap Preview goes into the Bullet Journal. If it's something that I do want to block specific time for, then I'll go into Woven, I'll block that time in my calendar. I will often write it into my Bullet Journal as well. The reason that I block it in my calendar, there are two reasons. One is I do like getting a little, like, ping reminder, like, hey, in 10 minutes, you should be starting, to make sure that you are sticking with that goal. This is the time that you have planned to take that action on the goal. And the other reason is I do a lot of coaching, and so I'm getting called, my schedule is open for my clients to book calls with me, and so I have to protect the time, that protection piece, to make sure that I'm not getting kind of interrupted and be like, oh, I intended to work on my lessons during Wednesday morning, but then so-and-so booked a call with me, If I haven't blocked it and protected it, that's on me. And so that's why I will use Woven to make sure that my calendar is up to date and protected. Now, the last piece of this is I will often put some of these things into Notion as well, because I do a lot of my long-term planning in Notion so I can make updates, I can make edits. I do a lot of collaboration with my assistant, sometimes other contractors. And so I am using Notion for some of these things, but it's really only, I'm really only putting into Notion things that apply directly to a larger goal or project, or is something that I need to collaborate on directly with another person. If it's just like something about a particular video or a goal, or it's just like I need to write down the, I need to finish these lessons in the course, then I'll just write it in the Weekly Preview and the Gap Preview. I'll block it in Woven and on my Bullet Journal just for a visual, visual reminder. And, you know, ping ping, the good kind of ping ping reminders. And I'll just stay in the Bullet Journal for that, like, daily productivity check-ins. One of the most common things that I hear from people when it comes to doing a Weekly Review or a Weekly Preview is the, you know, "I don't have time for this. I know what I have to do, so I'm just going to spend time doing those things." And I have definitely gotten stuck in that mindset before. I know I will get stuck in that mindset again. But when you do a preview and a review, the preview especially for this, is you start to clarify what really matters to you. Because in the moment, our heads can be such a jumble of things like, well, I gotta do this, and this popped into my head, and this, you know, like, I got this email, or I saw this on Twitter, or, you know, whatever it is, I got this direct message.. And so things that if you were to plan out your week ahead of time, which does leave room for spontaneity, it leaves room for flow, it does all of those things, but it gives you, it makes a promise to yourself about what matters. Because I know that when I go into a week, I would never write down as a main goal for the week or something that I really want to be focused on, I would never write down, I want to make sure that some random email that I get on Tuesday late afternoon becomes a primary part of my week. Sometimes, yes, those things happen, but they will be so clear in the moment. Like, this is something that I have to do for a sponsor. This is something I have to do for a client. But so often, if we don't have like these clear goals set for our week, we'll get something from a person that's just like, hey, can you get my— can I get your advice on such and such? And that can be important, but that can be a reason that— an excuse that we give ourselves to like take a step back from our primary goals to the things that we define matters to be like, well, I'm going to help this person. Of course I'm going to help this person. I'm a nice guy. I'm a nice person. But this is what Michael Hyatt calls the difference between uphill work and downhill work. Uphill work and downhill work is the goals that you set at the beginning of the week. Those are your clearest manifestation and vision of the things that are going to move your work, your company, your side hustle, your life onward and upward. It's going uphill, you're reaching the summit. Like, those are the things that you put in as your goals, right? The downhill work are the things that feel productive in the moment, but ultimately aren't really getting you any closer to that summit. They're just, you know, they're kind of like the best case scenario is that you're plateauing when you're doing those things. And often it's like, well, you know, I got to update this on Instagram, I got these 20 emails that I have to respond to. Do the uphill work, the goal-centric work that matters first. That is what's going to move your career, your life, your side hustle, whatever it is. It's going to move you forward when you seek to go uphill with the habits, with the goals that you have. When you take just 30 minutes at the beginning and the end of the week, and literally it can take like 15 minutes to preview and 15 minutes to review. At most, it's never taken me more than an hour to do both combined. And what's so valuable about this is if you think about your work as having like kind of that standard 40 hours a week, I can work sometimes anywhere from 35 hours a week to like 50 or 55 hours a week. That 1 hour to preview and review makes everything else clear. It is a, it It's just, it's like magic. Things that I can get distracted by, things that I can look at in my week or kind of get pulled, pulled aside or start going downhill, I can look at my preview and be like, I didn't write anything down about this. And I know that I need to get this video done. I know I need to get these lessons written. I know that I need to put together this media kit. I have all of these things that I know are definitive goals for me. And when I write them down at the beginning of the week and then I review them at the end of the week, creates such clarity for me. So now when I do a proper review, it makes my preview of the coming week better. And when my preview of the coming week gets better, then my reviews are going to get stronger and clearer. You can see again how both of these things play together really effectively. And so when you're doing this, just spending that hour, it's not even— gosh, I mean, is it maybe a tenth? Maybe it's a little bit more than a tenth, but it's such a small, small, small percentage of the time that you have each week. And to say that I don't have enough time to do a proper, even 30-minute preview and review of the week, then you're probably like way too scattered in the like day-to-day and the work that you think you're getting done. Create some clarity for yourself. Give yourself the gift of focus this coming week by starting out with a really strong goal-action plan. Protection, you know, planning, preview, and then follow it up at the end of this week by reviewing your wins. What were your aspirations? What were the results of those aspirations? And where do you need to pivot going into your next week's preview? The other thing that people often talk to me about when it comes to like, I don't feel like I'm being very successful with my goals each week, I can't, I can't seem to hit them, I can't seem to reach them. And so the review feels worthless and not very fun because I'm like, yes, I aspire to do this. And once again, the results were subpar. And so I've tried to pivot, but I really don't feel like doing this anymore because it makes me feel bad. And well, I would even have a quick little follow-up to that is if you find yourself getting in that mindset every single time you do a review, and so you don't feel like doing a preview, see, it works together in a negative way as well. Is you're not treating this as a reporter, as an objective reporter. You're treating it like a judge and you're saying like, you're not being good enough, you're not being smart enough, you're not like being consistent enough, you're not motivated enough. And I could go down a whole rabbit hole and maybe I will in a future show about like the motivation of all of this, but treat it like a reporter, treat your review like a reporter, not like a judge that makes yourself feel like you're not very good at anything. But the other part of this is if in your aspirations and in your results as a reporter, you're like, okay, here's another week where I'm not quite doing all the things that I aspire to do at the beginning of the week. Your pivot for the upcoming week now is not only to try and actively do less, so just, just literally go for one goal, one goal that I want to do, Here are the action steps, here's the time that I'm going to do it. But I would even make that goal much smaller than you initially felt like it could be or should be. So if, for example, my goal was to, like, release a new YouTube video this week, and I was like, one week went by, two weeks went by, I wasn't able to get it done. Instead of saying for this upcoming week, I have to release a new YouTube video because obviously, based on my review, that has not been working out. So the pivot that I'm going to make is to start much smaller. I'm just going to say to myself, my goal for this week is to outline, or maybe outline and write a simple script for the YouTube video. Since I do, like, you know, bullet journal overhead videos, then not only will I outline the video, but I'll also do, like, the spread. Or maybe I'll just outline the video. You see how, you know, maybe one of your action steps actually needs to become the new goal. Okay, so that's how we break it down even further. If you have a bigger goal and you listed your action steps, but you weren't able to knock out all the action steps, you weren't able to do anything with it, take the most important action step from that goal, and that now becomes your most important goal going into the next week. Because we're not after this feeling of like, I'm conquering the world every single week. If you're having trouble, again, reporting, reviewing, being honest with yourself. If you're having trouble doing the little things, that's totally okay. Everyone starts with the little things. And so look at it and be like, okay, what's the little thing that I know that I can do this week? Especially if you're already breaking down what was originally a bigger goal for you, now you can break it down. And even if you get that thing done, you're like, great, what do you know? I wrote that outline on Monday, crushing it. Now you already know, like, okay, I can add on another action step. And maybe just the ability to start small and tackle one, one thing for your goal is the momentum that you need to build so that you can actually get the thing done this week. Okay, I really hope that GAP and WAR preview and review acronym system is going to be helpful for you. Let me know in the— I guess you can't let me know in the show notes, but you can comment on the Connect the Dots YouTube channel for this. You can also just email me me, matt@mattragland.com, and let me know what your favorite part of this was. Thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode of Connect the Dots. Please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. That's the best way for it to grow and get more exposure since they're the ones that have ratings and reviews. But anywhere that you subscribe, any way that you listen or watch on the Connect the Dots YouTube channel or the Connect the Dots Clips channel on YouTube, I really, really appreciate it and it means so much to me. So thank you for being a part of it. The other thing that I want to tell you about is I'm in the process of doing a daily email experiment. So Sunday through Friday, every single week, I send a short, like, 2- to 3-minute read email about habits, about bullet journaling, about productivity. Like, each one is a different topic. It's not all of that every single email, but, you know, mindset, creativity. Every single day, Sunday through Friday, I'm sending sending a new email. So you can go to mattrogland.com/daily, and that is where you can get signed up. But thank you so much again for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots, and I'll see you next Monday with a new episode. See ya, bye.