2010 stood out as the best year of my life up until I experienced 2011. In those two years, I checked off more than half of the items on my bucket list and had some of the coolest adventures of my life (2010, 2011). I attribute most of this radical change to the introduction of a single process, my weekly life cleanse.
Every Sunday I block out 20 minutes and do the following for myself:
- Write a Letter to Myself
- Record My Happiness Measurements
- Review All of My Ongoing Projects
- Preview My Week Ahead
Write a Letter To Myself
This is my own version of a journal. Instead of reflecting on how I am feeling by writing a stream of consciousness, I find it easier to simply finish the end of the following self revealing sentences.
Dear me,
This week am I am feeling all of the following:
I am Happy about
I am Sad about
I am Thankful for
I am Resentful of
I am Optimistic for
I am Pessimistic for
I am Looking forward to
I am Not looking forward to
I am Jealous of
I am Anxious for
I am Laughing about
I am Eager for
I am Annoyed about
I am Afraid of
I am Embarrassed of
I am Ashamed of
I Understand
Record My Happiness Measurements:
After I have had a chance to reflect on how I am feeling, I take this insight and quantify it. From there I make it actionable. If for example, I am unhappy physically, I schedule time at the gym. I wrote about this for the first time several weeks ago. I am still in the process of converting this into a spreadsheet to share. Stay tuned! You can now download the spreadsheet here.
Review All of My Ongoing Projects:
I have found that the key to accomplishing a lot is not to implement more efficient systems but rather to improve my prioritization of work. I use OmniFocus to organize all of my projects. Every Sunday I take five minutes to audit each project in my system. I then prioritize which ones are most important by assigning due dates to the tasks that make up my projects. In this way, I force myself to get the most important tasks done first and thus move the most important projects along in a prioritized order.
Preview My Week Ahead:
As the final step of my weekly cleanse, I open my calendar and view what I have planned for the week ahead. I take this opportunity to apply what I realized in the previous steps and use it to dictate how I spend my time in the upcoming week. In this way, I am able to optimize my time for happiness.
While this has made a fantastic impact on my life, I don’t think it is perfect. Like everything, it is still evolving. For this reason, I would love to hear from all of you.
What processes do you use to review and preview your life?
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Photo – That is my friend Jordan during a sudden storm we experienced while golfing in Mexico.
