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:

  1. Write a Letter to Myself
  2. Record My Happiness Measurements
  3. Review All of My Ongoing Projects
  4. 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.

Overall Happiness

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.

Weekly Review

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?

Photo – That is my friend Jordan during a sudden storm we experienced while golfing in Mexico.