The Friday Morning Habit That Closes Out Your Week. Why I Do a Weekly Recap.
Close out the week with clarity and intentionality.
Most of us are pretty good at looking ahead. We plan the week, we set the priorities, we know what is coming. What we are not always good at is looking back. The week ends, you are tired, and you want to shut the laptop and get to the weekend (at least, I know I usually do). So the week just kind of gets left there. No real closure in terms of what happened and what is still hanging open. Then Monday shows up, and you are starting over from scratch, trying to remember what you were even working on and what you told somebody you would follow up on.
I have written before about weekly planning and how much I believe in it. But planning is only half of it. If you never stop to capture what actually happened, you are planning from memory, and memory is not that reliable by Monday morning (again, I may be speaking from experience here).
What if I said an extra twenty minutes on Friday could really put your mind at ease and set up the next week in a new way? And that it doesn’t need to add to your workday, just be an intentional use of your time? Sounds good, right? Here is what I have been working on.
The idea
The concept is simple, and actually mirrors a lot of what I have covered before either as a daily journal or weekly review. None of these need to be complicated or time consuming. At the end of the week, sit down and capture three things:
What went really well
What were some of the successes
What you want to do, or know you need to get done next week
That is it. Write them down. What I have found, especially the last one, it really begins to paint a picture of the actions I have coming up and they become clear in that moment. Thinking about the week as a whole jogs your memory for tasks or loops still open. I almost always come up with three or four things I would miss if I didn’t write them down right then.
When to do it
I have added my Weekly Recap to my to do list as a repeating task every Friday morning.
Friday morning is best
Friday afternoon works if that is a better time for you
Saturday morning at the absolute latest
Give it 15 to 20 minutes. No more than 30. If it starts feeling like a project, you have made it too big.
How to do it
Write those three things down
If you have another task list you use during the week, transfer that stuff over
Write a little narrative about how your week was. Things you saw or did, who you talked to, what you closed out.
Add a little about what you want to get done or what it meant to you
It does not have to be a lot. This is not a report for anybody else. I have found it ends up being a recognition session in a lot of ways. It feels good most weeks to see how much actually was accomplished.
Why it works for me
I have tried several different ways and times of doing this. As much as I still struggle to do this on Friday mornings when I really want to, a week does not usually go by that I do not get it done. Sometimes it is Saturday morning. Sometimes it is Sunday because I know I still did not get to it.
But when I do it, it feels good. I get to review the week and look at it and think, wow, I really did get a lot done. Then I have a clear path of good things to carry into next week. That helps me move the week forward.
I just feel good afterwards. Every time.
Why Friday morning specifically
This is an important detail, and why I urge myself and you to do this on Friday mornings.
You still have time on Friday to close some things out
You can look back at what you wanted to accomplish that week
You can spot the little setup items you could still knock out today that will set you up for next week
You are fresh and the energy is there in the morning.
Why the morning? The biggest obstacle I find myself facing more often than I’d like to admit is that if I tell myself I will do it later in the day, I get caught up in other stuff. By the end of the day, I just want to get wrapped up for the week. Then the day is gone, and I feel like I missed an important deadline, and missed closing out something unfinished in my head. So I try very hard to ensure I complete this Friday morning.
If you already plan on Sundays
This plays right into it. You are already set up for success. Take a few extra minutes. The Sunday session gets a whole lot easier when you are not starting from a blank page. You are working from what you already captured on Friday instead of trying to reconstruct the week from memory. I still do planning on Sunday, but I already have some of the key items completed and can just plug them in. In many cases, on Sunday I set up the files or start the emails so I already have them ready to go for later in the week. If I need to set up meetings for something, I create that list so I can send and finish on Monday mornings (I try really hard not to send meeting invites and emails on Sunday).
Put the two halves together
Planning is recapping and recapping is planning. The recap and the planning session are not two separate habits. They are one system, and each one makes the other one work better. The recap looks back and captures what actually happened, what you finished, and what is still sitting there. The planning session looks ahead and turns that into priorities. Without the recap, your planning is built on whatever you happen to remember. Without the planning, your recap is just a nice list you wrote and never used. Put them together and you get something that can really help you feel good about the week finished and the week ahead.
Start with the recap. It is the easier of the two to build, and it is the one most of us are missing. Twenty minutes on a Friday morning. Then go enjoy your weekend.
Do you have a way you close out your week? What works best for you?
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