How to Do Weekly Reviews Well

hey everyone and welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is ray and i'm about to go into my virtue to do physics or cambridge and in this video i want to talk about something which i've been finding super useful for the last few weeks which is ideal weekly reviews now if you're about to click off the video because you think that you've tried weekly reviews before and it just doesn't work for you or that you don't have a good set of weekly review questions or you just struggle to find yourself being able to do it then do stick around for the video because like i struggled with all those issues before but now i've sort of set up a system in place which makes doing weekly reviews easier and holds me accountable and sort of um makes the whole process so much more

enjoyable so like i said initially my problem with weekly reviews was that i thought i had to do on notion and i had set up like a perfect notion database and find a perfect set of questions or something or think of my own questions and it would just stop me and procrastinate like i would keep procrastinating from doing weekly reviews it was super long and i would just like have life passed so much more quickly because i'm not taking time to reflect back on each week as it comes and goes and i'm not taking time to be like appreciative and whatnot so i ended up finding a set of questions uh which a friend actually gave to me and neil nander um his blog is linked down below in the description which is incredibly useful so i would suggest reading it and he does weekly reviews on a google form himself so i'll show like how this works so this is a weekly

review on the google form and google forms are really useful because you're just answering questions and you are only focused on the process of answering questions and you don't have to worry about like i don't know dragging blocks around a notion or like it's just a more convenient way of like filling in a google form for yourself and having this stored away on your google drive so for this weekly review uh the questions are uh what comes to mind when thinking about this week what might were my go-to topics this week what was the success this week what am i proud of what about what are my biggest bottlenecks this week's what can i learn from them and change moving forward spend five minutes trying to solve one or all of these bottlenecks usually at this point i would set a five-minute timer on my phone and then like try and spend at least five minutes because it can be easy to spend like one minute and then just give up like forcing yourself to spend five minutes is really useful one of the coolest things i learned this week what is my current having a problem so a hamming problem uh it probably requires some backstory to explain the term so i think there was a researcher called richard hamming who works at bell laboratories and during lunch time he would often go to his colleagues and speak about like what kind of research are you working on or um like getting a sense of what they're doing for their job and stuff and then he would start to like ask questions about their fields and like the important issues in the field and like what's holding the field back and touching more deep deeper and philosophical questions about like if what issue if was solved would like propel this field forward by leaps and bounds or something and then it'd usually be a case of the question he asked at the beginning or what are you working on and this like question of like what is the most important issue in your field um like what the person was working on often wouldn't be the most important issue in their field so then at the end he would ask him why aren't you working on that issue and because of that particular question at the end it makes it made him uh disliked or it annoyed quite a few people around him but it's a very valid question of like why you work on this particular problem so a hamming problem is more or less like the biggest problem you're currently facing in your life which you feel is holding you back in some way so it could be say your productivity system or it could be like say some friendship problems you have or like some relationship just anything else which you is always on your mind and you feel like you want to make some progress on that problem or just think about it a bit more but you keep avoid avoiding doing so so it's what is my current having problem so for me often this would change like every two to three weeks and then it's be okay so have i spent at least five minutes solving this problem so often it'd be the case no and i will do it right now so i'd set a time of five minutes and then i would often find myself spending much more than five minutes because once i get started and having spent at least five minutes i find myself gaining a lot of traction and making a lot of progress on this particular problem and then i just start like said number time in five minutes or ten minutes and then just continue to write it because i found that to be incredibly valuable because often you have the solutions for these problems in your mind but you just have to spend enough time thinking about them and like potentially discussing them with others in some cases to be able to like uncover the solutions within yourself so then the next question is what am i currently being idiots about how good was my mental health this week how predicted was i how successful did i think this week was what did i do this week uh who am i thankful for so like as a bonus i don't know exercise or something you can probably send them a message or give them a call or next time you see them you can actually tell them uh that you're thankful for them being in your life and that you can explain why if you want to as well or you can just say like you're thankful to have them uh which interactions were unpleasant and exciting this week what could i do to nudge them in a more positive direction and then what are the biggest takeaways of this review so quite a few questions on this review um and i wouldn't answer them all every week but it was still a very useful exercise to answer most of them every week and doing that for the last three or four weeks has helped life pass so much more slowly and helps me to like appreciate a lot more things and like work on a lot more problems than

i'm facing in my life so if you want to like get these questions yourself then you can go onto my website which is just over here so there should be a link down below in the description and if you scroll down then you can see the weekly review questions and then you can copy and paste them and if you want to make a google form yourself then just go to google and then write in forms dot new and then press enter and that will take you to create a new google form so then you can like set the name of the google form and call this like weekly review and um basically create the new google form for yourself so set that to paragraph and then just copy and paste questions over then add another question below and it seems kind of sad just like making a good form for yourself and you being the only person filling it in but like that doesn't matter because even though like initially i thought it was a little sensitive making a form of yourself but it's really not because you're just getting so much more value out of like just filling in a simple form for yourself every week and just you just make a lot of progress so it's about considering the end goal here so then i just keep adding more questions and copy and paste the questions over you can do that and then go to responses and you will be able to see your responses and because this is a nuclear form there are only responses here and if you press the kebab icon then you can press select a response destination and then you can make this and you can connect this to a spreadsheet so if you press like i said name for this and then press create so all those google forms responses will start going to a spreadsheet and then say in a year or two you will can you can look back on spreadsheets and say like hundreds or like 104 rows over two years of just weekly reviews and see how much progress you've made over the years and it can be a really good feeling of just like being able to look back on every week and just be reminded that week be reminded of who you were thankful for that week what kind of things you enjoyed what cool things you learned and then just everything else now if you didn't find those weekly review questions are useful which are over here then you can change your questions up a bit or you can delete some questions which you don't find yourself filling in much or you can think of new questions and then just add those to your weekly review and don't worry about changing your weekly review google form like in the middle of it because that doesn't really matter or don't worry about having to make a new google form just suppose a different set of questions just do everything on the same form so after you've made the form you can press send and then you can press the link button and then i don't know press shorten link and then just copy this link and like bookmark it so if i press copy link and then just paste it into here and then i can then bookmark this link and come back to it and just i don't know make progress on weekly reviews so as a

way to hold myself accountable i would recommend setting aside a time every week where you would do the weekly review and for me usually i would do every sunday at about 10 a. m and i'm gonna hop on a call with some friends and we'd all do this weekly review together and we'd stay muted for about 30 minutes um and just focus on doing this weekly review and then afterwards we would speak about like how our week has been and speak about some of the responses like cool things we learned that weak or exciting things we found exciting or even maybe our having problems although i would bear in mind that if you're speaking about having problems with friends then do make your intentions clear or like just make the communication clear about whether you just want to vent about this problem to them or whether you want them to propose solutions because if you just want to invent about the problem and they think they have to propose solutions to it then one of their solutions maybe may offend you or you just may not like it and then that can like kind of make a friendship worse so just make your intentions clear about whether you want to just invent to them or whether you just want you want them to think of a few solutions for you and do take their solutions with pencil and pinch of salt as well because you understand your own problem much better than everyone else or you can talk about how you've been trying to tackle that problem right now and hearing them talk about how to tackle their own problems can be quite useful in helping you tackle yours too especially if your problems are of a similar genre but yeah i recommend doing

this with close friends every week or like every few weeks or something and if you want them to like understand the value of a weekly review and stuff then i don't know send them a link to this video and just be like hey do you want to try this thing out together but yeah i think that's basically for the video hopefully you found it useful hopefully you can start doing some weekly reviews and maybe even do your first weekly review after this um like i don't know watching this video and make a google form for yourself copy and paste questions over and then just fill in the google form and set yourself a timer about 30 minutes because you can sometimes spend two hours filling out the form so it's quite good to set yourself a limit before you hit domination returns but yeah that's basically for the video and i guess i'll see you next time bye