Every Friday afternoon I spend forty minutes looking back at the week. It is the least glamorous habit I have and the one I would be most reluctant to give up.
The format is simple. I open the calendar and the notebook and ask four questions: What went well? What did I avoid? What did I learn? What, concretely, do I want next week to contain? I write a sentence or two for each. Then I close the notebook and stop working.
The value is not in the answers. It is in the fact that, once a week, I step out of the current and look at the water. Patterns I could not see from inside the days become obvious: the project I keep postponing, the person I keep meaning to call, the one afternoon that always goes wrong.
A week is a good size for reflection. It is long enough to contain a shape and short enough that you can still remember what happened on Tuesday.
