Why We Resist the Weekly Review and Plan

Ricky Spears hits this topic right on my head. Why we resist weekly planning and review session? This is a critical session that many time management methodologies contains and weights this as a important step. Ricky found out there are couple of reasons (20 of them) on that:

1. It’s not on our calendar.
2. We don’t know how or we fear we may not do it right.
3. We don’t have a step-by-step plan for it.
4. We aren’t ready—and getting ready is too overwhelming.
5. We feel that the weekly review is a “have to” instead of a “want to”.
6. We haven’t defined our outcome vision.
7. We have’t defined our purpose and principles.
8. We think it has to be perfect and complete.
9. We don’t see the benefit of it.
10. We don’t have time.
11. We feel we don’t have enough to review.
12. We feel we have too much to review.
13. We are too far behind or haven’t done a review in several weeks.
14. We have no accountability.
15. We don’t like the isolation.
16. We find the weekly review boring.
17. We fear we might get interrupted.
18. We fear what we will discover.
19. We’re scared of what others will think about us.
20. It’s hard.

I observe this maybe the main reason: getting ready for one week is just too overwhelming. People can deal with long term goal setting and planning, and deal with short term planning and task prioritization. It is just more complex to see all those tidy details on each task. It is just overwhelmed by one week worth of tasks. Uncertainty is the other keyword here.

Another simple reason it is just not in your calendar. Frankly if it is not in your calendar, you basically won’t do it.

Why We Resist the Weekly Review and Plan (and What You Can Do About It) – [Ricky’s RAM Dump]