A little over a year ago, I decided to experiment with the monastic community practice of keeping a rule of life. I wanted to know how individuals might be able to use this practice, and so I’ve been working with, and writing here about, what I call a personal framework.

I wrote down some things for my own personal framework. It’s actually not a lot, just some notes to myself about the kind of person I want to be, and the ways I want to act in this world, in the short timespan of a human life. (No pressure, right?)

What I’ve learned over the past year is that, for me, a weekly review is the key to helping me live out my values.

The weekly review is what turns my good intentions into real actions.

David Allen of GTD fame was right: all of our hopes and aspirations, if we want to live them out, funnel down in the end to performing a few physical actions* (Allen 2015, pp 132-134), for example:

• contacting people (phone, email, text)

• showing up for things (meetings, appointments, excursions)

• writing up ideas so they can be developed and shared

• putting things where we will reliably be able to find them again when we need them

And it’s the same with your values. If you want to live out the values that are important to you, eventually your aspirations need to be funneled into a few physical actions, in real time, in the real world.

And when it comes to changing your habits, your behavior, your life, you as a human being need to engage and grapple with the same basic information, over and over, in order to make progress.

This is why people pay coaches! This is why coaches are a thing! Coaches are people who remind you, over and over, of what is important. Coaches look or listen to what you’re currently doing. Coaches guide you in aligning your actions with what’s important.

And coaches repeat things. A lot. This is because we as human beings need repetition and iteration to grow. Consider that we have whole classes of careers where a big part of the job is to coach people; to remind others — repeatedly — of what to focus on, and what they can do to make progress.

We have athletic coaches, executive coaches, religious and spiritual leaders, community organizers, personal trainers, teachers, medical care providers, social workers — for all these professions and more, part of the job is coaching: helping people get and stay aligned with the basics, and helping people to perform real actions, in real time, to make their values concrete.

When You Review Your Personal Framework, You Coach Yourself on How You Will Live Out Your Values

When you write down your values and review them on a regular basis, when you write down a personal framework for yourself, and you read it over and think about your week ahead, you can identify actions to help you actually live your values out.

One of my values is to stay connected to family members who live out of state. My actions include texting or calling them, and sometimes mailing out cards or packages. I don’t naturally remember to do this. It’s reviewing my personal framework that reminds me I want to stay in touch with people, and gives me a little time and space to think about whom I might want to reach out to in the next week.

With a weekly review you remind yourself of what is important to you. Regular review is what makes a personal framework something that actually shapes your life.

Also, when it comes to reviewing your personal framework, it’s a major context shift from reviewing your tasks and appointments for work.

One review - the work-related review — is about things that are often urgent. The other review — the values review, the personal framework review — is about things that are important but non-urgent. The things that no one else will push you to do.

The Work-Related Weekly Review: Deadlines and Deliverables, Urgent and Often Important

For a long time, I’ve done my version of David Allen’s weekly review, where you look over the past week or two, look at the week or two coming up, and organize your tasks, appointments, meetings, and make a plan for the week ahead.

When I do a work-related weekly review, I’m sitting at my desk, I’m looking at my calendar, I’m looking at the apps I use to organize my projects and lists, I’m looking at my quarterly plans, I’m looking at deadlines.

You need to be in a certain mindset to do this kind of review well; you need to be thinking about tracking and moving lots of different pieces. For a work-related weekly review, you’re looking at your calendar, you’re looking at your projects and tasks, you’re making a game plan for the week coming up. “Gotta call the furnace company… dental appointment next Wednesday at 3:30, ask spouse to pick up the kids… oooh, that project bid is due, set aside a block of time to finalize it…”

In other words, with a work-related weekly review, you’re dealing with stuff that either is urgent, or will become urgent, unless you make a game plan ahead of time (which of course is what this review is all about — maybe we should call it the weekly game plan!).

With work (and housework and family care-giving counts as work!), we’re talking deadlines, appointments, deliverables.

Your Values-Related Weekly Review: Reviewing What is Important, but Almost Never Urgent

I discovered last year that I could not be in that “fit the puzzle pieces” mindset, and I personally could not be in front of a screen (way too distracting for me), to do what I’ve come to call my values review — this weekly time when I sit down to review my personal framework.

I make the review of my personal framework separate from my work-related weekly review, and I make it relaxing and fun for myself. I use colorful pens, and nifty notebooks to write in. Where the work-related weekly review is done at my desk, on a laptop, with my calendar and apps open, my values-related weekly review is done with pen and paper on the porch, if the weather is nice; or in the VERY comfy reading chair in my reading and journaling corner, if it’s cold or raining.

It takes me about 20 minutes once a week to do this. At the end, I like to identify one or two small (SMALL!) actions or practices to focus on for the coming week; and that goes into my plan for the next week.

I found that I also had to review my personal framework weekly, in order for it to make a real impact IRL. However, the feeling of it is completely different from my classic work-related weekly review. (Partly because of all those colorful pens I like to play with!)

Reviewing a personal framework is a more contemplative, reflective process. Rather than putting together a puzzle, you’re mulling things over, you’re asking yourself, “how am I doing with living this out?” And, “what is an action or a practice I can do next week to keep me attuned to my values, my life philosophies?”

Although some of the documents I use for my personal framework are digital, I printed them out and put them in a folder. I found over the past year that I do best with the values review, when I go completely analog. I have a few short documents, and some notebooks, which include:

• A list of the values I want to live out, based on my roles and relationships — this is about half of a typed page. (More about figuring out your roles as related to your values here and here; briefly, what I mean by “relationships” is the list of my values, for how I relate to aspects of life: e.g. God/Life in general, the natural world, technology. What kind of person do I want to be, how do I want to act, in relation to the natural world, in relation to my cell phone…? That kind of thing.)

• A list of the routines I am committed to, to keep myself feeling unhurried and peaceful, at work and at home — this is the other half of the typed page. (For example, I strive to set a designated quitting time.)

• A notebook where I have sections for each of my life areas.

What I’m calling a “life area” is what Cal Newport in his podcast calls a “bucket,” what Khe Hy of RadReads calls a “domain,” and what I’ve heard others call “areas of responsibility.”

A project, task, or appointment is something that can be done, checked off: e.g. the furnace was acting up, we called the furnace repair company, now the furnace is fixed. Check. Done.

A life area, on the other hand, would be your household. So, yes, a furnace repair was done; but household maintenance is forever. (And you get to decide how you want to live in your home — whether you choose to be a minimalist or a maximalist; what “clean” means in various rooms; what artwork is on the walls, etc. — that’s the values part, the discernment part.)

So “life areas” are those big-picture aspects of our lives that are ongoing. The life areas I look at in my values review include:

• my physical and mental health

• my spiritual and contemplative life

• holidays and celebrations

• my connections with others

• my home and yard

• finances, how I’m handling money

• my creative output, my work

I have a notebook** with pages for each life area.

When I sit down to do my review, I just write down a sentence or two about how things have been going in that area over the past week, and what I want to do over the next week.

It’s quick! And it’s about the nitty-gritty! This is not deep thinking here; this is a status report.

For example, when I was thinking about my health, I realized over the past week I hadn’t gone out for many walks. (For me, walking falls under both mental and physical health…)

I’m still catching up from the holidays, and I’ve been sitting too long in front of the computer. So here’s what I wrote for health: “Doing well with morning stretches but I haven’t been walking much, and it’s getting to me. Next week I want to get outside at least four days out of the week and if nothing else, take a spin around the block.”

It took a lot longer for me to write this post than it does to review my personal framework.

But one of the things that is non-urgent but important to me falls under the “creative output” life area: and that is to write and post to this blog consistently, so — here it is. Check. Done.

If you are reading this, you can see that I just lived out one of my values.

And that feels great!

References

https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Weekly_review1.pdf, accessed 7 January 2022.

Allen, D. and Fallows, J. (2015) Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Revised ed. Edition. New York City: Penguin Books.

Notes

*Allen acknowledges that next actions can be difficult to determine, which is why knowledge workers particularly need to set aside regular time to think about what, exactly, the next action that moves a given project along, is: “The next action should be easy to figure out, but there are often some quick analyses and several planning steps that haven’t occurred yet in your mind, and these have to happen before you can determine precisely what has to happen to complete the item, even if it’s a fairly simple one.” (Allen 2015, p 132)

**For me, it is important that this values review feels enjoyable, so I use a fancy-schmancy notebook that is a treat to write in. Well worth it, since the pleasure of using it motivates me to sit down to do the review.