Start. Stop. Review
That’s how life should be..or not?
Recently I was speaking with a dear friend of mine who did not understand why her best intentions to achieve her goals weren’t just adding up.
She knew where she was going and had set out a very beautiful plan to get there, complete with a huge reward for when she got to her destination.
Her plan looked really good, except that she forgot one very important aspect of goal setting – the power of appraisals.
You see, my friend had her list of steps to achieve her goals, however, because she did not create checkpoints for appraisal, she did not have a system to measure what was working and what was not, and in a world where things switch up so fast and get complicated in the twinkle of an eye, setting out a roadmap to achieve your goals without creating stop point to reflect on your progress can be very costly.
This is why.
Humans are complex. And we interact within complex ecosystems. How we think something works now might be quite different from how it will work in the future. Our environment within and without has the power to alter the results of the same component such that we end up with different results of the same input under different seasons.
Plus our life seasons can be wildly different.
A season of your life might demand more from you than you know. And if you don’t stop to take stock of how your days and weeks are going, you might find yourself burning out or doing less, not because you are not trying hard enough but because your inner self is in a different season and requires a different approach.
Alright. I guess you get what I mean by now.
So what are empirical appraisals and how are they conducted?
I’m glad you asked.
Empirical appraisals are simply appraisals that help you make informed decisions for the future
In other words, from these kinds of appraisals, you draw enough information to help you make better decisions in the next season or sprint of your life.
Empirical appraisals are divided into two – Reviews and Retrospectives.
If you are in the tech world you already know where I’m going.
Or maybe not.
But you will be amazed at how technology can contribute significantly to how we live our complex lives in a complex world.
Ok.
So what are reviews and perspectives?
Very simply, reviews help you check WHAT you have done in the season under appraisal while retrospectives help you check HOW you performed in the season under appraisal.
Let’s assume you are appraising yourself at the end of the month.
Your review will be the list of things you got done within the month and the milestones you achieved.
These include but are not limited to
- The number of books you read?
- The certificate you bagged?
- The exam you took?
- The promotion you got?
- The money you made?
- The milestone you hit? Etc.
You get the idea.
Essentially reviews tell WHAT you got done.
Retrospectives on the other hand tell HOW you did what you did
- How you showed up? Tired? focused? distracted etc
- What worked for you – waking up early? Pulling an all-night (maybe because your creative juices work best at night and you decided to take one day a week to let it flow)?
- What do you need to stop doing because it just didn’t work out for you? E.g. taking coffee because you wanted to stay awake
- What do you need to continue doing because it was useful? Such as spending time praying
- The things that helped like staying away from draining conversations
- The things that hindered you such as scrolling social media in the morning…
- What was the greatest lesson you learned?
- What stole your peace?
- What do you need to let go of or resolve?
- What is not worth your time anymore?
You get the drift.
With the retrospectives, you can already see how you can track your performance and tweak it to your greater advantage.
Personally I love to do retrospectives on a more granular level i.e. weekly because that way, I can still clearly remember the experience of the week and more accurately capture it. Because the likelihood of remembering how Monday went on a Saturday is easier than remembering how the 1st day of my month went on the 30th of the month.
You understand right?
Even better, I have a few questions I ask myself daily to check how I performed during the day. Questions like
- Did I show up with joy and strength today?
- Did I show up with beauty today?
- Was I disciplined with my time today?
- what did I give my primary focus to today?
I started to ask myself these questions in a season of my life when I needed to be more intentional with joy, strength, beauty, discipline, and focus. You can design your EOD (end of day) questions to do that for you too. And it doesn’t have to be four questions. It can be one but one question that will greatly help you make a better decision about tomorrow.
Even reviews can be done on a more granular level.
You can ask questions such as
- what did I achieve today? or
- What did I achieve this week?
This is so beautiful.
There is so much power in looking back over your day, week, month, quarter, half year and entire year to see, not just what you have achieved, but also how you lived and achieved stuff. And then take the knowledge from there to make more empowering life decisions.
Another part of this is that you can design your appraisals to be at the end of a work sprint, giving you a break and time to recover between achievements.
So for the day, the break will be your night’s sleep.
For the week that can be any day you choose. For me it’s Sunday. Sundays are my off days. Literally.
For the month that can be any time you choose. For me, I take breaks on the 29th and 30th of every month. On those days, I have no goal on my agenda, All I have is rest, lounge, and lots of play!
And the same way it goes for a quarter and the year.
That’s the difference between empirical appraisals at THRIVENATION™ and every other appraisal, including the ones in the tech world. Just in case you’re in tech and noticed the similarity.
For us, we take a break in between. It’s almost a non-negotiable.
So that was what I asked my friend to do and I worked with her to do that.
The next week she called me beaming with smiles. She had cracked two of the issues and was looking forward to uncovering more.
One of the issues she had was about her attic which had been disorganized for a while since after her nephews visited her. She knew she needed to clean it up but she hadn’t created the time. Now my friend is quite finicky with neatness. But because she didn’t have the time yet, she ignored the attic.
The problem was, her shoes were kept in the attic and anytime she needed a change of shoes, she had to go up there, and when she saw the mess, her inner self didn’t appreciate it at all. She left the attic somewhat unhappy and that made her start her day on an unhappy note, one she wasn’t very conscious of but was fully present.
So essentially, she was exhausted by the mess of her attic before her day even started simply because neatness was a core value for her. Of course, she wasted no time in fixing that
But do you know what helped her discover that?
The question – what stole my joy today?
It was when she asked that question that she traced it to her attic and finally realized why she was feeling drained before she even resumed work.
Your joy is connected to your strength.
Now it’s your turn,
Do you conduct regular reviews?
Have you considered appraisals in this manner?
Are you willing to try it out?
Think through it and let me know what you think and what you will start doing.
When you are ready and you have decided, type in the comments and let me know which one it is (or they are)
Praying for you and rooting for you.
You definitely can be all you were born to be
Love, Light & Lots of Laughter
