I used to hate weekly reviews. They felt like paperwork — fill out a form nobody reads, file it somewhere nobody looks, repeat until you stop doing them entirely.
Then a client escalated an issue that had been sitting in someone's inbox for nine days. Nine days. The person who normally handled it was on vacation. Nobody knew it was their responsibility. The client was furious.
We had a weekly review. We just were not using it to catch anything.
What changed
We stopped treating the weekly review as an activity log and started treating it as a diagnostic tool. The question is not what happened this week. The question is what almost broke and do we have a process for it.
Accomplished vs planned. If you planned five things and accomplished two, the problem is planning, not execution. Track the gap over four weeks and you will see the pattern.
Blocked items. For each blocked task, ask why. Waiting on a client is normal. Waiting on internal approval or missing information is a process problem. Blocked items are signals about where your systems are fragile.
Ad hoc work. The fires that consumed your week. Client emergencies, vendor surprises, technical failures. If ad hoc is under twenty percent of your week, that is normal. If it is over forty percent, your processes are not preventing fires. They are leaving you to fight them. This is the single most important metric and almost nobody tracks it.
Process health score. Four questions on a scale of one to five. Did we spend time on the right things? Are any processes breaking? Are we fixing root causes? Is there anything we should stop doing? Total score out of twenty. Below fourteen means schedule a process review. Below ten means escalation.
Handoff notes. Write these as if you are handing off to someone who knows nothing about your week. Because someday that will be true.
Get the Weekly Review System → $15. Scoring guide included.
