98 - Reflect and Review

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today, we’re going over the 8th pillar of the Scale Your Small Business System: Review. It’s important to recognize that it’s crucial to take time to pause, reflect, and evaluate. Otherwise, you may make things much harder than they need to be. 

 

A good rotation of review can happen quarterly, but if you haven’t got that sort of time, there are a few things you can do it five minutes through a weekly review. 

 

The first thing is cleaning up your area. If you’re surrounded by mess, your work could be impacted. May way for your work. 

 

Next up, put everything in a pile. That way, everything is in one place ready for you to go through it on a weekly basis. 

 

If you find your brain is clogged, brain dumping can be your best friend. When you do this, you’re able to get those thoughts out of your head without them being lost to the abyss. Then, you can come back to them when you’re ready.  Remember to give yourself time to write down more than the obvious stuff. Dig deep and find things that may be causing you fatigue. 

 

Now, if you have 15 minutes, review your previous calendar and make sure you didn’t miss anything along the way. 

 

From there, review your upcoming calendar so you know what’s on your plate the week ahead. 

 

Additionally, empty out your voicemail and inbox. This doesn’t mean addressing every single item, but do take stock and make sure you know what you have. Form a habit of deleting anything unneeded. 

 

This is the time to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything. 

 

Go through your text messages to make sure you don’t have any outstanding texts you need to reply to before you start your week.

30 minutes for your weekly review? Do everything up to this point, and add these:

 

Sort through your pile from earlier. Perhaps some are more urgent, things you need to file, whatever it is, put it where it needs to go. Create piles that make sense to you. 

 

Write your weekly to-do list. Sometimes, this will spark your memory and remind you of items you may have forgotten about. Also, review last week’s to-do and move whatever you need to.

 

If you have an entire 60 minutes to do your weekly review, here are some additional practices to consider:

 

Review your projects. Especially when you have a larger one, break it down into small chunks. Ensure nothing has been forgotten or fallen through the cracks. 

 

Review your ‘someday maybe’ list. This list is for you to remind yourself of what you may have time to take on. 

 

Next, consider creating a ‘43 folder’ system, where there are folders for every day of every month of the year. From there, you can put in any items, invitations, or important files based on the day they need to be reviewed. 

 

Schedule next week’s weekly review. If you can do this at the same time every week--awesome, but don’t let a reschedule stop you from doing this important work. 

 

Update any software you may have waiting. You can perform other tasks on this list at the same time!

 

Empty your digital and physical trash cans. This seems minor, but this small step makes a huge difference. Something as simple as making sure your desktop and actual desktop will give you a truly fresh start. 

 

Key Takeaways

 

A weekly review is an essential step to prepare you for your week ahead and prevent tasks from slipping through the cracks Your weekly review can be whenever and for however long works best for you--but make sure you take the steps necessary to give a good look towards your week. Sometimes the smallest tasks make the biggest difference. Don’t ignore the little things!