Jumpstart Progress with One Short, Weekly Meeting

One of the most common challenges I see is clients feeling like they don’t have time to sit still and assess the big picture. And it makes sense - we’re juggling a lot, navigating the daily demands of a complex environment while trying to figure out how to make progress on what matters most to us at work and at home.

Having a standing weekly meeting with yourself is one of the most powerful and immediately impactful things you can do to get unstuck and start feeling progress. A weekly check-in can help you reconnect with purpose, assess progress, identify roadblocks, & design interventions to start seeing positive change. 

While the results can be significant, the time commitment isn’t - I promise it doesn’t take very long. Here’s how to design a basic one to get started:

First, choose a time you can commit to every week and make it a recurring meeting on your calendar. For me, it’s 8:30 a.m. on Fridays with a cup of coffee in hand, but for you it might be Tuesday afternoon during your kiddo’s soccer practice, or the first thing you do in the office on a Monday morning. If you can’t commit to a recurring time, choose one day of the week and commit to checking in sometime during that day every week.

Next, choose your reflection questions and use the same ones each week so you can evaluate change over time. Pro tip: save your questions in the meeting details so they’re ready for you when you sit down. I suggest my clients start with three categories:

Category 1: “During the last week, did I (enter behaviors that support your goals)?”

Examples might be things like “spend half an hour uninterrupted clearing out my inbox each day,” “get in a walk after lunch,” or, one of my current questions for myself, “Did I take bold action this week?” Aim for 3-5 of these.

No need to pass judgement on yourself here, just be honest about what the data say.

Category 2: What’s working well & how might I improve?

Start by giving yourself credit for what’s going well! Many of us tend to gloss right over this part, but it’s worth acknowledging. Then, ask yourself what you could do differently that would help you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

This is where you get real about what needs improvement and identify a few experiments you could run to generate progress. Too many workday interruptions? Maybe you try blocking out deep work time on your calendar. Not eating enough fiber? Maybe you commit to adding one vegetable to each meal. Think about what’s getting in the way of success, choose one experiment to run on each topic, and commit to trying it for the next week.

Keep your changes to 2-3 total at a time - we all think we can go from zero to everything if we just try hard enough, but the research tells us change is much more sustainable if we build it incrementally, over time.

Category 3: What else is important for me to do this week and when will I do it?

This helps elevate things that tend to roll over from week to week on our to-do lists - things that fall into the “important but not urgent” quadrant of the Eisenhower Matrix. Aim for no more than 3 things and schedule time on your calendar to handle them (yes, right now, trust me).

Write out your answers to these check-in questions each week, either in your digital calendar appointments or by hand in a planner or notebook. It shouldn’t take you more than 20-ish minutes.

You’ll start seeing patterns from week to week, highlighting themes you might not have noticed before.

Intentional reflection and assessment on a regular, relatively short cycle (weekly vs. quarterly or yearly) allows you to make small, manageable changes that build on what’s working and generate progress.

If you want more help designing your weekly self check-in, send me a note and we’ll build a meeting that helps you start feeling progress on day one.