One of the best ways to get a solid start to the day and to cleanly wrap up your days is with morning reviews and evening reviews.
When you combine these together, they form a ritual of daily reviews.
What Are Daily Reviews?
A daily review is simply reading through your personal ops documents and goals. This reminds you of all the important things in your life top-to-bottom, in a 10-15 minute chunk.
You do it once in the morning, which is your morning review.
And once in the evening, which is your evening review.
Why Are Daily Reviews Important?
Daily reviews are important because we all have a vision of what we want our lives to be like.
But sometimes it can be hard to keep this vision front-of-mind when we’re in the thick of things.
Daily reviews give us the ability to zoom out and see the big picture, as well as the ability to zoom back in and see the details.
Doing this:
- Allows you to know what you stand for.
- Provides emotional and motivational fuel and reasons.
- Leads to better health, finances, relationships and more.
That is an amazing return in exchange for just 10 minutes of your time every day.
How to Perform Your Daily Reviews
Your daily reviews should be performed twice every day.
Your morning review is done in the morning, at the tail-end of your morning ritual. I like to do mine right before starting work for the day.
Your evening review is done in the evening, at the tail-end of your work day. I like to do mine right after finishing work for the day, and then write tomorrow’s journal entry.
Daily review process
Here’s how to do your daily reviews.
First, sit down and open up your journals and personal ops documents.
Second, go through your personal ops top-to-bottom. This means reading over your:
- Mission.
- Values.
- Reasons why.
- Personal philosophy/affirmations.
- Virtues and vices if you have them.
This will remind you of the big picture — why you do what you do, your vision for yourself and what you stand for and believe in.
Third, go through your journal entries in descending order. This could be:
- 3-year journal entry.
- 1-year journal entry.
- Quarterly journal entry.
- Monthly journal entry.
- Weekly journal entry.
- Today’s journal entry.
Reviewing your journal entries will remind you of the specific outcomes, goals and processes (the what and the how) you have selected for yourself to move towards your bigger picture and vision.
Implementing Daily Reviews as a System
The hardest part of implementing daily reviews is having all the prerequisite documents and journals in place.
Once you have a set of personal ops documents and journals, reviewing them is easy.
You can also review these documents at any time during the day when you need a reminder of who you are, what is going on and where you stand. This could be over breakfast, during your commute or while waiting for a meeting to start.
What To Do Next
Set up your personal ops. Then set up your journals.
Then do your daily reviews, morning and night.
If you want a full walkthrough of the entire process, grab a copy of my productivity training course, Resilient.
Photo by P.O.sitive Negative.