No More Monthly & Quarterly Reviews – Use DuoCycles Instead

Today we're going to dive into a new approach to life and business review cycles. This is an enhancement to PPV called DuoCycles, replacing both Monthly Reviews and Quarterly Reviews – and better complementing Weekly Reviews. This is all part of the new Pillars, Pipelines & Vaults system. (or PPV) is a life operating system to shape and design the life you want for yourself. It helps you identify what matters most to you in life, translates that into specific aspirations with deep meaning to you, and breaks those down into actionable steps. Then it provides clarity and a precise action process to consistently move toward accomplishing those life aspirations, making real progress every week. We're in an ongoing series here sharing more about the new PPV system that has evolved a great deal since the version one of the system that started on this channel years ago. By creating an immersive community learning environment for our membership and training program, we have been able to evolve and improve the system at a rapid rate. We had five annual version upgrades to the original PPV system and then completely rebuilt PPV from the ground up, taking full advantage of the significant enhancements to notion's capability. This required a foundational redesign. This new rebuild is called PPV Pro and it is unlike any other life system I have ever seen using Notion or otherwise. One of the many PPV enhancements has been the introduction of duo cycles. Today I'm going to share a segment from our most recent cohort where I introduce the concept of duo cycles and why it's so powerful for achieving your life aspirations. Let's dive in. First, let's look at where duo cycles fit into the new PPV system. So, this is our diagram of the new PPV system. In the previous video, we looked at pillars and a redefining of pillars. A whole new approach to pillars changing from what the original PPV system had done. Now, we have the new enhanced, more significant pillars. Today we're going to jump over to the cycle reviews. Cycle reviews include a series of different reviews over different periods of time. The largest being the annual review and then the duo cycle and then the weekly review and our daily entries. The duo cycles is new to the ppb system and really to any system. It's not something you're going to find anywhere else, but it is a better way to keep on track and implement an annual plan for reasons we're about to dive into. But I just wanted to put it in context here of where it fits into the overall system. It is the highest level cycle review under annual review. Now, let's dive into the segment from our recent cohort that goes deeper and explains more fully what duo cycles are all about. The purpose of these is to keep your system on track. In systems thinking, we have a lot of elements that define how we think about systems functioning. And one of the key elements is the concept of balancing properties. If a system just runs on its own without balancing properties, it will decay. It will degrade. It will entropy, it will stray, things will start wandering. That's the essence of how system happens over time. What balancing properties do in the systems thinking framework is that they keep these things together. They maintain it so that the straying things get pulled in, the degrading things get boosted up and kept at the standard that they should be and they make it so the system is sustainable. Balancing properties make systems that function longterm. And of course, we want our life systems to be sustainable and long-term functional. So, we need balancing properties. And the biggest among them is the cycle reviews. This is where we keep things from going astray, from degrading, from falling apart. So, they're extremely important and they're fundamental to the system. The hardest thing for many people in implementing a system like PPV is doing these regular cycles. It's a challenge for some people. It is a routine. It takes discipline. For some people, it's easy. Some people it's really enjoyable, but for a lot of people it's the thing that's hardest because your days get filled up and it becomes a challenge in those intervals. We're going to talk more about that, but these are among the most important and powerful aspects of the entire PPV system. So, I really encourage you to commit to making this work because it is fundamental to the sustainability of the system. If you have trouble consistently doing these, then make them a routine just like any other routine in your system. You'll schedule them. You'll plan them. And you'll do them consistently as designed in your system. There'll be an item that comes up as any other important routine in your system. Have a scheduled action with a due date at a consistent time in a consistent place every week in the case of the weekly reviews. So, this avoids that decay and entropy that is natural because it's just the nature of things. It's the nature of nature for things to entropy and decay and to degrade. and you need support and maintenance of some sort to maintain that long-term sustainability. This little bit of time that you put into it, let's take the weekly review for example, the little bit of time you put in each week, let's say it's 20 to 30 minutes, that little bit will pay off

exponentially because that 30 minutes of planning every Sunday or every Friday or every Monday will enhance every other hour of your week. It not only brings a sense of clarity, but it absolutely does that. you now know clearly what is lined up, what is queued up because it's, you know, we talked about the value of the alignment zone, right? Well, the cycle reviews are the maintenance of the alignment zone. They keep the alignment zone aligned and they keep the active elements of it active and queued up and loaded so that you can execute day-to-day when you open your focus zone. So, they bring immense clarity on what you need to do and when it and so the map is just laid out and presented in a perfectly clear fashion. They also bring peace. They reduce anxiety because your mind cannot wrap itself around everything going on in your life. It's just too many moving pieces. When you have a system like this and you have check-ins with the regular review cycles, you know everything is in its place and everything is being taken care of in due time. Everything will be checked, everything will be verified, and everything will be lined up properly. You know each piece is under control because you have regular check-ins and you have a process for ongoing regular check-ins and future dates. So you know nothing will stray, nothing will be forgotten, nothing will be lost. That brings an immense amount of peace and just a sense of relief that you don't have to worry about all these stray pieces that are beyond what your mind can even comprehend. There's the duo cycles. So these are review sessions and planning sessions every two months. Now traditionally the review cycles typically fall on monthly cadence and quarterly cadence. This comes from the business world. This is common for businesses. And essentially what we're doing with a lot of these PPV practices is we're taking practices of top tier high-erforming small businesses and adapting them to our personal lives. Now that's great and that brings a lot of clarity and structure and consistency and clear vision of where we want to head. But not everything in the business world translates one to our personal lives. There are things frankly extensive things we've modified to take the broad concepts of business planning and reviews into our personal lives and adapting them and optimizing them for a personal life system separate from and not basically dictated by a business system because business systems they're working with departments and they're working with teams and they're coordinating across a lot of people. A lot of it is to communicate across different groups and functional aspects of the business and to create accountability for people working in different divisions and different departments. And it's a way of enforcing a consistent behavior and movement towards a consistent objective across a diverse set of operating functions and departments and teams. That's not really the case in our life system. So there's a lot of adaption that is beneficial in making a true life system even though it was inspired by business practices. So for a personal system doing monthly reviews and quarterly reviews that's an awful lot of review sessions. We're already doing weekly reviews and planning. When you add on that monthly which are bigger deeper ones and quarterly it's a lot of review sessions for a personal system where you're not coordinating departments. You're not creating accountability for subordinates and team members. It's just not necessary. It's frankly, it's just it's overkill. So, we're simplifying in one way. That's part of what we're doing here. The question is, how can we get more done more efficiently? And the answer is duo cycles. Replace quarterly reviews and monthly reviews with two-month duo cycle reviews. So, many of you are familiar with the book and the concept of the 12-week year. And the logic of the 12-week year is that you can do more in 12 weeks than most people can do in 12 months with the right mindset and strategy. So if you apply yourself on a quarterly basis to setting objectives and targets that you really commit to achieving in quarters instead of years, most people would do this on an annual basis. You set your big annual goals and then you got all this time to get to them and then in November and December you realize the year is about to end and you're far behind on where you should be. So you make a big push to finish and complete your year objectives and if it's even possible you do what you can at that point. Well what if instead of doing that at the end of every year you did quarter and then you make that big push to meet your quarterly objectives then four times a year instead of once a year you're making the big push to meet your objectives and to deliver on the commitments to yourself and to anyone else involved. That is a gamecher when you think about things that way. And you need to put certain systems in place, monitoring, tracking to do it quarterly rather than annually. And that is what a lot of businesses do. Again, 12week year is built very much for businesses, but it's something we can learn from in our personal lives. And a lot of people have adopted this. This is a popular framework and it's something that has been one of the influences on PPV. You'll see a lot of this thinking in PPV already from day one in the original version one and ever since. So this creates a greater sense of urgency and focus.

It helps overcome the tendency to procrastinate that often comes with annual planning. And it allows more frequent evaluations and adjustments of goals. You have more iterations. You have more feedback from those big final pushes. And you can apply that learning in each iteration more frequently. You get four shots on goal instead of one. The same logic that applies here. Why would you do duo cycles instead of quarters? Because you can achieve as much in two months as you can in 3 months. This is almost always the case. The rest of the bullet points are identical to the logic of the 12-week year logic. It creates greater sense of urgency and focus. It helps overcome the tendency to procrastinate. It allows for more frequent evaluations and adjustments of goals and iterative learning. When you're working on a quarterly basis is your big objective intervals. The first month you feel like you got a lot of time to go and it tends to be a slack month. It's more relaxed. You're not worried about it. Almost all the big work and the big push to achieve these objectives comes in the second and third month. Why not just capitalize on those more effective second and third months and make those the whole interim when you start and you know you have two months to go. You don't have slack time. You need to get to it. on it and you need to start making things happen. progress right away. Part of it is changing your psychology, but it's also changing your pacing, your cadence, and your commitment to achieving things. Now, let me point out this doesn't mean we're going to grind harder and just burn ourselves out on this a faster work schedule. We're talking about life systems here. These are not necessarily business systems. They can be professional objectives if you are prioritizing business. But now we have six intervals instead of four. We can actually have a broader balance if we want across those six intervals. So maybe four of them are business emphasized. You're going to have a range of objectives in each across life and business. But often times people will have an emphasis on business in a certain season of their life or an emphasis on health family in different seasons. Now you have uh six intervals instead of four. You can have four that are hyperfocused on business if you want and then two maybe one that's focused on exploration or health and you have one that's extra focused on family and you just do a lot more that way. It actually gives you more room to balance if you want to or hyper commit to one area. It gives you faster, more consistent implementation in that one area. It's totally up to you. Whatever you're setting your life aspirations at or your goals at is going to be reflected here. And you can balance and trade between these different cycles. You now have more to work with. So you actually have the opportunity if you want to have more balance or broader range of them. And again, with each of these duo cycles, you're going to be making a commitment to yourself on priorities. You'll still have more than just your top priorities, but you're really committing to one, two, three priorities. Just like in our daily planning, we're deciding what would make today a success. If I do this one or two things, maybe three, but if I do these, today will be a success. We're similarly defining what would make this duo cycle a success. If I do these one or two, maybe three things over this two-month period, then this duo cycle will be a success. We're prioritizing and saying of all the things we're going to do and we'll do many things in that time period, we're really going to do everything we can to knock these two things out. That's going to make that period a success. And that kind of clarity and commitment will change your life. So, we're just trying to refine and enhance the optimal cadence here. And I have found that 2 months has been a real game changer in my life when I shifted to the two-month cadence. As we said here, the same issue with annual goals relate to quarterly goals in that you have slack time in the beginning because you just feel there's no rush. When you feel you really need to commit to make it happen from the start of the cycle, you just get more done. It's that simple. So the other point on this is that's largely comparing quarters to duo cycles. Now when we look at monthly reviews relative to duo cycles, if you're looking at quarters, 3 months is too long to go with just weekly reviews. you're going to need some bigger intervals to manage some stepping stones, some milestones across a 3-month period. But two-month periods, weekly sessions can manage that interval. So, you suddenly get to the point where because it's a two-month period instead of a 3-month period, you can manage the interim, the progress during that two-month period entirely with weekly cycles. You no longer need the monthly cycle. So you've reduced the number of review sessions on the monthly side and you've empowered and enhanced the implementation consistency relative to the quarterly one. So it's a win on both sides. You have fewer review cycles, but you're actually getting more done than you would have otherwise. Connor says, I like the cadence. This ties into duo cycles. I like the cadence of the quarterly reviews and how it syncs with my nineto-ive job. If I was a business owner, this may be different. Is it possible to continue those instead of the duo cycles? So, of course, you can do what you want, but this is a life system. There's nothing in your 9 to-ive job that requires you to have your life system review cycles matching theirs. And in fact

you're sort of degrading yourself and being subservient to their time cycles is preventing you from doing what's optimal for your own life and your own systems. So, I wouldn't just sort of slavishly follow the dictates of your employer for your own life planning and processes. I just went through why this is better in many ways and again we're optimizing for our personal systems not for a work system. Now if you're running a small soloreneur business then this can be your work system too. I'm saying when you're working for a larger company and coordinating with departments and teams there's a reasons for more frequency there because you have a lot more people and departments to coordinate. But in terms of you planning your career progression, your health and wellness, your family objectives, none of these things need to be dictated by the norms of your corporate employer. So at the end of the day, you do what you want to do. But this is so much of a gamecher. I know it has been for me and the people that I've been experimenting this idea with. And I just can't see a real advantage of the old system when you have this possibility here. I'm sure there are some use cases somewhere where it would make sense, but here's what I would say. Try this. You've tried the other. You've never tried this. I will bet you if you try this, you're going to find it's better. But again, at the end of the day, you choose. All right. So, there we go. And again, just liking the cadence of quarterly reviews and monthly reviews. I mean, that's the cadence, the only cadence you've ever known. So, it's hard to compare something where you've just only done one thing and then there's a new idea and you've never tried it. You've barely even thought about it. So, I'm encouraging that you guys across the board in PPV, especially this new reinvention of it, to not just stay in the fixed blinder box that you've always lived in, and think how can I just try new things and experiment. So much of improving your life is doing constant mini experiments, trying things, experimenting with things, testing things. If you're not doing that constantly across the board, you're missing out on so many ways to live better, so many new things to try, put into effect for your life, you're just basically following the dictates of the society and the environment you're in. And in some cases, that's good and in some cases you're missing out. So why not do the experiments and live a life of many, many experiments and find what works best for you? That's how PPV evolved in the first place. I didn't like the boxes of GTD and these various existing systems and so my life a little laboratory and I tested and tested started sharing those and found that many of these things I discovered were things that resonated broadly with a wide range of people. So a lot of the things that brought you to PPV are the same things that are leading me to encourage you to try this. So you do with that what you will, but I think you'll find that this is a no-brainer when you try it. So that is what Duo Cycles is all about. Let me know what you think in the comments below. This video is part of an ongoing series. I'll add the next ones to click on in the upper left and upper right corner of this video screen at the end of this video once they're released. In the videos to come, we're going to dive deeper into the new PPV, taking the concept of a life operating system further than ever before. If this is of interest, be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get updates on future videos. And please hit the like button if you found this video valuable. Leave thoughts or questions below or join us in the new notion life design program when it relaunches soon to explore these topics more extensively. That's at notionlifedesign. com. I also write the lifedesign newsletter on increasing human capability. I give away several of my best notion templates to anyone who subscribes to the free newsletter. The newsletter link is also below in the description. Thanks for watching. Lots more to come.