Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash

Whether it is a day, week, month or a year, planning is useful in any situation as it gives you clarity on what you aim to do in a given moment of your time. However, following up on what you did in the same unit of time gives you a perspective about how productive you were. It would be daring to say, but it can also check your general feeling of satisfaction, or even happiness.

COVID-19. As we are living unique times (yeah, we could always say this, but this time it is really unique), recording and tracking what is happening with you during these weeks or months might have a huge learning potential for yourself and your immediate surroundings.

As the recent article (Week 13/2020. Plan and Manage It Productively) was about planning a week, let’s follow-up on it by giving an insight on how to evaluate based on your own experience.

Monitoring your week for a good evaluation

As a week is a rather short period of time, it is not that hard to recall what you experienced and achieved during these days. However, an easy and useful thing to do every evening might be to write down just some basic ideas about what happened during each day even if you are using just some keywords for this, like key meeting on a topic, an event you attended or bigger things that happened in the world which might have a direct impact on you, too.

 
Focus on the key issues you defined for yourself. Rate your progress. Photo by the author.

When to do your evaluation?

Doing your evaluation shall be a moment when you do not feel it is a burden to you, or you are not in a rush for any reason. Depending on what you want to focus on during your evaluation, you could do this in the final part of your last working day, or you can allow yourself just 30 minutes for doing this during the weekend, even if this means that you take some time away from your loved ones. A clever way to do this might be by waking up 30 minutes sooner on Sunday morning or finding a proper time when your surroundings are also quieter, like after lunch or during the evening. If you manage to create a habit of when to do this evaluation every week, you and your surroundings will also get used to this, and everybody will respect it.

What to remember from a week?

As we also suggested that defining some key goals and topics for the week is vital to keep you focused, evaluation can also start from addressing those topics and how you performed with tasks related to them. Just recall what you did with this and maybe rate yourself in percentage or in any form but using some kind of exact figure. Of course, it is rare to have a week when everything is totally under your control as your surroundings, partners, collaborators are also advancing with their tasks. Recall what key moments occurred which had an influence on your week.

 
Moments to remember and conclusions. Photo by the author.

COVID-19. Try to give a special attention to what changed in your week’s progress because of the special situation causes by the current coronavirus pandemic. Did personal work change? Were you forced to do something differently? Perspectives changed? What did your surroundings tell you about what has changed?

Things to take to the next week

Don’t forget this. Listing what you need to push for the following week or weeks will help you in doing planning for those moments. Don’t get into a lot of details but mark these aspects in such a way that you will be able to recall them when needed while planning.

Going through your weekly evaluation

Each of us can create her/his own habit in doing a personal evaluation. No matter if you start from your general feeling or from your key goals, the only important thing is to get yourself a full picture about how your felt your week was. It is a matter a perception, and most certainly even without doing an evaluation you still have an impression about these past days. Getting into some details about them and writing them down will help you recall things more exactly and will also help you drawing some conclusions about how to do things in following weeks.

An idea: plan and evaluate at the same time

While evaluation is about the past and planning about the future, the moment is still now and connecting the moment of looking back and looking forward might be very useful. Be aware, this might mean that your time-investment for both together can be bigger, but it might still be less than doing them separately. However, if you do them together, you will able to do a lean transition from one to another and you will be able to transform key takeaways and not-yet-solved tasks more easily in an action-plan for the following week.

Finally, mark yourself

 
Mark yourself, set yourself your own grades. Photo by the author.

Giving a rate about your past week might just give you a general insight about how you FEEL your week unfolded. It doesn’t have to be a rate given based on results of some perfect monitoring tools, it is just a feeling, that is the idea. Also, there might be a difference about how you feel regarding your work week, your home life, or your socialization.

COVID-19. Marking yourself during these challenging weeks might be even more relevant as all aspect of your life are suffering changes. As there might be several aspects of that change which will stay for a long time, tracking your progress during subsequent weeks of this health and then economic crisis might help you going through it while coping with changes in an easier way.

As it is highly probable that your are also a person during this difficult times who is confined to working from home or leaving your home for just the very basic things like going to work or shopping groceries, your home life can get a different perspectives (even being with your loved ones) while

So, an allyourtime® proposal for doing a weekly evaluation looks like this:

  1. Key goals and results and your achievement percentage
  2. Other results
  3. Passing on to next week
  4. Key moments to remember
  5. General conclusions and takeaways
  6. Mark yourself (work/homwe/life)

 
An allyourtime® proposal for doing a weekly evaluation. Photo by the author

Ready to evaluate yourself? Tell us how you progress with this or what methods you do for your self-evaluation. See you next week!