Make It a Practice: The Quarterly Review That Keeps Your Week From Drifting Again
Everything in this series so far has been a one-time exercise.
Find the pattern. Name the role. Take one thing off. Each of those is worth doing once, and each of them decays.
That is not pessimism, it is just how a busy quarter works. The week fills back in. The request you would have declined in September arrives in November, when you are tired, and it is easier to say yes. Three months after the subtraction, most leaders are carrying the same load in a different shape.
So the last piece is the one that makes the rest survive contact with the calendar. Not a bigger effort. A smaller one, on a schedule.
The quarterly review
An hour, once a quarter. Put it on the calendar for the whole year now, because a practice that depends on remembering is not a practice.
The first time you run the audit, four weeks is the right window. It is enough to be representative and small enough that you will actually do it. Quarterly is different. Pull the whole three months.
The reason is that a quarter shows you a direction and four weeks only shows you a position. A single month tells you where you were. Three tells you which way you were moving, and the direction matters considerably more than the number.
A leader at fifteen percent and rising is fine. A leader at forty percent and falling has a problem that the forty is hiding.
What you are looking for
Not the same three buckets again. You know how to sort a calendar by now.
Four questions, and they take about ten minutes each once the sorting is done.
Did the thing you stopped last quarter stay stopped? This is the one people skip and it is the most useful of the four. A subtraction that quietly reversed is worth knowing about, and it usually reversed for a reason you can name.
Is the work only you can do growing or shrinking as a share of the whole? Direction, not position.
What arrived this quarter that nobody decided to add? Every quarter brings something that got absorbed rather than chosen. Find it while it is still new enough to hand back.
Does the role definition you wrote still describe what the organization needs from you? It should change about once a year, and if it has never changed you probably wrote it to be safe rather than true.
Then look forward, not just back
This is the half that gets skipped, and it is the half that prevents the next drift.
Look at what is already on the calendar for next quarter, before it fills in around you.
What is booked that belongs in the third bucket?
What is not booked that should be, because it is the work only you can do and should be doing?
And what will fill the space if you leave it open?
That last one is the honest question. Open time does not stay open. It gets taken by whatever asks loudest, which is exactly how the last quarter went.
One caution
Do not respond to a full calendar by adding a planning day to it.
I have watched leaders discover that their week is too full and solve it by putting something else on the week. The instinct to fix a problem by adding is the same instinct that produced the problem. That ‘calendar hold’ you added seems easy enough to be replaced by urgent. So, the muscle you’re trying to work and improve never gets tested. You can prove the muscle is working when there become more days with no appointments or holds on your calendar.
The response to a full week is subtraction. It is always subtraction.
Why this is the piece that matters
Nothing in this series is difficult. That is not the obstacle.
The obstacle is that a leader will do the audit once, find something real, act on it, and then never run it again, because nothing on the calendar ever comes back to ask. Drift does not need permission to return. It just needs you to stop looking.
An hour a quarter is four hours a year. Schedule them. Compared against a week you did not choose, that is not a meaningful cost.
If you want help building the practice rather than just running the exercise once, that is the work I do. Let's have a conversation.
Find the real problem. Do the real work. Build what lasts.
Comments