10x Your Productivity With This 3-Step Daily Review Process

Waking up with thoughts racing, mental brain dump flooding your mind, everything on your to-do list comes rushing to the surface.

You know the feeling.

There’s an old saying that failing to plan is planning to fail and there’s a reason it has stuck around for so long.

As an entrepreneur, and even moreso as a solopreneur, the only way to win is to be relentlessly efficient.

Everything from your personal to professional and social life is on you to organize.

You need a plan. A simple, repeatable, daily plan to keep you in control.

I’ve tried many productivity tools, read books on how to organize for maximum output, and developed comprehensive multi-hour systems for achieving peace of mind with regards to my to-do list but over years of testing and refining, I’ve found that a daily, simple, fast review gets the job done better than any system or software I’ve tried.

Here’s the 3-step daily review process I use:

I do this at the end of every work day to ensure everything is fresh in my mind and tasks are properly weighted in terms of priority.

1. Assess the day

Review your calendar.

This assumes you keep a calendar — if you don’t, you need to start. Use Google, outlook, or a day planner (old fashion pencil and paper) — but get in the habit of tracking what you do every day.

I put everything on my calendar from research time, to meetings, to walking the dog, making dinner, and doing the daily review. I understand that this level of detail might be overboard for some but I find that if I don’t record what I’ve done, two things happen:

1. I feel like I didn’t get anything accomplished. This is me being hard on myself but a lot of my work is research and ideation so, if I didn’t track this time on the calendar I‘ll always be wondering what I actually did.