Stop and review your progress

Before you kickstart your week, stop and take stock.

Every Monday at Zen Working, we’ll be looking at kickstarting your week. But before you can really kickstart your week, you need to stop - and review your techniques.

Was last week a good week or a bad week? What caused this? What would allow you to have a good week, and how can you avoid a bad week?

For instance, this time last week I posted 10 steps for writing a great to-do list. But there’s a lot more to Zen Working than reading about it. You actually have to do it. That’s why the first thing I did this morning was to revamp my old to-do list. I used a table instead of a straightforward list of items, moved the three main projects into their own table cells with headers, and put the rest under a Miscellaneous box.

Last week, I got ambitious with some big ideas, and that’s why I suggested doing a little dreaming on a Friday. Today, my wife and I took the weekend relaxation post and applied it to a Monday evening. We walked the dog and went shopping.

This week, I’d like to try and make Wednesday an email-free day, but instead of having another Ambitious Friday, I’d like to try and get some things finished by the end of the week. Perhaps next week I’ll try and address my long-standing difficulties with getting up in the morning - or maybe I’ll try and do it sooner.

In fact, I’ve already followed my own advice by writing this post - stopping to review the tips I’ve posted so far, looking at how many of them are already in place, and what I still need to work on.

So now it’s your turn. Have you applied any of these tips to your working life yet? What are you going to change this week?