My Method: Self-Evaluation, Habit-Tracking, and Weekly Review
Through multiple iterations over several years, I’ve developed a self-evaluation process that’s highly effective (for me). If you are just getting into self-evaluation, or looking for ways to modify your current approach, welcome! If you need some inspiration or reasoning as to why you should self-evaluate, check out this essay.
I hope I can offer something useful to you. But don’t stress it if my way isn’t 100% (or even 0%) satisfactory for you. Take anything from it that you like, test and feel it out, and decide for yourself. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants myself. Maybe you’ll iterate upon it and come up with your own twist!
The world of self-development is vast and deep. I imagine I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life.
Updated at the offset of 2021 for simplicity, my self-evaluation process is made up of two parts:
- Daily habit tracker and to-do list recap
- Weekly review
I also journal freehandedly in Evernote and Notion, especially after meditating or when something is bothering me. For now, we’ll keep that part separate.
Daily habit tracker and to-do recap
I do this at the very end of my day. In Evernote, I check off all to-do list items I completed, including those items I retroactively added because they came up unexpectedly in the day and I had to handle them. I will add a couple journal-esque points about how I’m feeling.
Then, I enter 4 single digits in my habit tracker. For each habit I’m aiming to achieve daily or weekly, I enter a 1 if I completed it, and a 0 if I did not. 1s turn green and 0s turn red because color coding is highly motivating for me. The goal is to fill the sheet with green over the course of the year.
Those 1s and 0s also add up on a separate page, called my scorecard. This is something new I’m experimenting with because I like the idea of having a quantitative score to measure my productivity. However, the score doesn’t tell the whole story, which is why I leave a column for notes to highlight the qualitative elements of that week.
I’m currently sharing this template exclusively with Staying Curious Newsletter subscribers. You can drop your email in the form at the end of this page if you’d like one!
Weekly review
Ahh, my Sunday evening ritual. Inspired by Jim Collins, I began doing weekly reviews in September 2019. Since then, I’ve iterated a few times, and now I use the simple Plus Minus Next journaling from Ness Labs.
At the end of the week, I look through my to-do list items from the last seven days and I bullet-point them in Evernote. In the Plus column, what went well? In the Minus column, what didn’t go well? In the Next column, what am I focusing on next?
It’s that simple. Copy and paste these lists into the cell corresponding to that week in the sheet and I’m done!
Maybe something else will work better for you, so I encourage you to experiment. This is allll about you, baby. But not only does regular self-evaluation make you happier and healthier, it also makes you treat the people around you better. Or it should, if you’re doing it right.
Success in this process comes down to being brutally honest with yourself. Did you cheat on a habit you’re trying to break? Even if you didn’t tell anyone about it? Especially if you lied about it?
This weekly review tab is on the template mentioned in the last section.
Keys to Success
A successful self-evaluation routine has to meet three key needs. It must be:
- Designed around what’s important to you.
- Scheduled or automated enough that you can fit it into every day.
- Completed consistently.
What’s your self-evaluation and habit-tracking process? I’d love to hear how it differs from mine! Tweet @ me or shoot me an email: contactshelbysmith.co@gmail.com.
Stay curious, stay growing.
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