6 Steps To Manage Your Weekly Review

Stop and Think. We often tend to forget this in the corporate scenario. Not stopping for a weekly review call can lead teams to lose track of tasks (completed or pending) and the performances relevant to them.

Lose sleep, and you build up a sleep debt. Similarly, miss a weekly review, and you build up its debt. It’s essential to treat this review call with as much importance as you would a sales or client meeting. And dedicating a review call each week to your progress only requires 6 steps to effectively manage them.

Set a clear day and time each week

Having a review call allows you to have an objective view on your week’s outputs, and even incentivizes you to be proactive with future tasks and their planning, in the manner above. Being objective, however, means having an aim.

This accordingly means having a timeframe and a tool to enforce it with. One such tool to help you with this case is MultiCall, a group calling app dedicated to let you call many with the ease of calling one.

MultiCall’s Call Scheduling assists in helping set up the meeting, not just in setting the date and time with the necessary team members, but in its ability to set the meeting to recur and auto-initiate the call as well.

Clear your inbox

Our email service providers themselves try to sort mails into multiple inboxes, at different categories or levels of importance. Collaboration during remote working has presented itself as a WFH issue that makes our  inboxes open to virtually anyone, for putting another task onto our to-do list. How regular you clear your inboxes is entirely up to you, but the weekly review call is a perfect time to clean the slate.

Have a “Waiting-For” list

The time taken to accomplish tasks during teamwork is sometimes subject to someone else’s delivery of outputs. Having a managerial position means that there are a multitude of such tasks that you are waiting for. It’s therefore appropriate that you keep reminders of all the things that you are waiting on; to get back from or get done by others.

Maintaining such a list would allow for a clear and prepared discussion, with active follow-up during the weekly review. One of the easiest ways to keep such a list is create an Excel or similar document to categorically list all tasks that are underway, with a column clearly allocated to who’s in charge of the task. The image above is an example of this.

In order to be effective, this has to be accessible and editable by everyone in the weekly review calls.  Remember to update your waiting-for list on a regular basis!

Set high priority tasks for the upcoming week

Studies have shown that the biggest tasks ideally ought to be finished first in order to give way for the smaller ones; not the other way around. One of the best examples summarizing this is the case of the jar metaphor.

If you need to fill a jar with a few rocks and sand, place the rocks first, else otherwise they won’t fit into the jar. In your case, the jar is the amount of time you have available in the week, the rocks and sand being your tasks in all their sizes.

As you may have guessed by now, the rocks represent your heavier, high priority tasks that need to be completed. Of course, this practice isn’t to be set in concrete. A fluid situation demands a due amount of flexibility, so you can always adjust your boundaries to stay on track with such tasks.

You can also amend the waiting-for list previously shown with an additional column to mark the priority and order of tasks!

Check and improve projects

As the adage goes, “what gets measured, gets managed”. Continuous improvement of process and productivity can be managed by regularly tracking your tasks during your weekly review.

As with digital marketing, where we constantly check our inputs’ performance by metrics like impressions and reach, it’s imperative to identify a relevant metric by which you want to measure your performance, and improve upon it subject to your goals.

This then can be compared and assessed during the weekly review call. You can use the above image as a reference! However, this doesn’t apply just to you, it applies to your team as well. Making sure that everyone has actively involved in the process is also critical to performance.

MultiCall’s Call Monitoring system helps here; not just in being able to monitor who is involved, but also to record and keep track of each review call.

Check your goals

Not clearly articulating each week what your goals are could set the review call adrift, and render it pointless. Needless to say, writing down your goals allows for an increased likelihood toward achieving them. Many successful people know that and keep a list of their goals in some form. This is where keeping your goals SMART(Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time bound) comes in.

In the simplest sense, ask yourself about your goals:

• • Specific― What exactly do you want to progress in or achieve?
• • Measurable― What are the numbers involved here? How much of what do you need?
• • Actionable― Is this feasible? Can you act upon it?
• • Relevant―Is the task relevant to you and your current situation?
• • Time-bound―How long do you intend to achieve this in?

When completing your weekly review call, you can check your goals, and therein your progress. Given your progress, you can then change your course of action if necessary.

It’s only human nature to achieve as much as we can with as little as we can. In this sense, the weekly review call may not seem appealing, like another item on the day’s to-do list. However, when considering the results obtained, the time and the regular effort exerted accounts for a significant portion of our performance output. With the right tool and the steps previously mentioned, the weekly review calls can be managed to allow the company to reach greater heights, and greater levels of productivity.