Review Your Week with The WRAP Method

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Daily Dot, the daily version of the Connect the Dots podcast. It is January 7th, 2022. It is the first Friday of the new year. And what I want to share with you today is the bookend of the GAAP preview, and that is the WRAP, W-R-A-P, review for your week. If you're going to have one takeaway from me at the beginning of this year, one key to stacking your productive weeks, it is to practice this gap preview and the wrap review because it creates this tiny effective productivity kit that you can use to start stacking those productive weeks at the beginning of the year. If you're listening to this and you're not sure what the gap preview is, go back and listen to that episode of the Daily Dot earlier this week. I'll link to it in the show notes, but the wrap review provides that essential bookend to looking back at the week that you just had without judgment and without self-criticism, just a review. We talk about this concept of being a reporter of your week instead of the judge of your week. Now this can be very challenging, but it is something that resonates with a lot of people. I've talked about in my 2021 review that not being so self-critical is one of the biggest lessons that I learned in 2021 and am attempting to practice more in 2022. So let's go ahead and lay out the WRAP review method for the week. The W is for wins. And this hopefully is you celebrating that you accomplished or completed your biggest goal for the week set out in the GAP preview, but it can also be other things that went well for you this week. Wins that you had personally, professionally, relationally, could be anything. Take some time to celebrate the wins that you had for this week. The R stands for results, and this without explanation can often be confused with wins. Wins are wins, whether you intended for them to happen or not. And hopefully one of your wins is the result of achieving your goal that you set out at the beginning of the week. But the results section is where you're looking back and saying, what were the goal or goals that I intended to accomplish this week? What are the actions? How much time did I protect? And looking at them again as a reporter, not a judge, and saying, What was the result of my gap for this week? What was the result of any deliverables that I had for this week? Again, you're approaching this as a reporter, so you may look at it and say, I was able to achieve the goal. Hooray. That's in the win column. But the amount of time that I protected, I thought that I would be able to get this done in 2 hours. It turns out it took me 4 hours. That is a result that you need to understand. So that you can better prepare for next week. Now the A in the WRAP review stands for alignment. If you've seen one of my early YouTube videos about the WRAP review, I had originally said this stood for aspirations, and that was a little repetitive with the results. And so now I think of it as alignment. Think of this in a very linear fashion. What were the wins that I had? What were the results of, say, my intentions, my plan, my preview for the beginning of the week. And then you're asking yourself off of those results, is the kind of work that I'm doing, is the kind of person that I'm being aligned with the type of person that I want to be? Is my work, are my goals aligned with my big picture vision, with the longer term goals that I might have? So if you listen to the QMWD episode, you can look at it and say, is the deliverables that I had this week, are they still aligned with the quarterly goal I have with the monthly milestone that I set out. So thinking about the results and your wins, do they align with the type of work that you want to be doing, with the goal that you're pursuing, and from a very big picture, the type of person that you want to be. The P in the WRAP review stands for pivots. And what this allows you to do is think about, based on the wins that I had, the results of my goals, and the alignment of my actions with the goals that I set and the kind of person that I want to be. Are there any pivots that I need to make for next week, for next week's gap preview, in order to stay aligned and make great progress? This could be, say for example, we talked about this time tracking, time protection. Maybe you were able to accomplish the goal that you set out at the beginning of the week. But it took you 4 hours to do instead of 2 hours. Now you can take that result, that data point, and look at the next week and say, okay, I want to do this again. I need to pivot to protect 4 hours instead of 2. Or maybe the subtle pivot is saying, I can still only protect 2 hours, and so now I need to say that I'm going to get this done every other week instead of every week. The other way that you can kind of look at this P, and I, I don't put this in, it's not like the 2P wrap at the end, but you could also basically look at it and say, I'm just going to continue making the same kind of progress, like things are going well. So I'm going to keep progressing with the work that I'm doing. Okay. So as a quick recap, the WRAP review stands for your wins, your results, your alignment, and then any pivots that you need to make going into next week's GAP preview. So when you think about the GAP and the WRAP, the preview of the week and the review of the week, they form a nice little feedback loop that you can use to stay really consistent, to make sure that you're aligned and ensure that you are making proper progress on the bigger goals that you have and the type of person that you want to be in this new year. That is it for this episode of The Daily Dot, the daily version of the Connect the Dots podcast. Just a reminder that the third cohort of the Productivity Power-Up closes on January 10th. That's this upcoming Monday. So if you want some more information on it and to learn more about how you can join and have a community and a course to follow as you start the new year, just go to productivitypowerup.com where you can learn more and join us for this 4-week live cohort, work with me directly. Set the tone for 2022. That's what I'm going to help you do. All right. Thanks so much for listening, and I will see you tomorrow.