Weekly reflections at work

10 minutes a week to make intentional career decisions

Early this year, I started a new role and the one thing I’ve been doing diligently is a weekly reflection where I ask myself a few questions:

• What have been my wins & progress areas this past week?
• What were my blockers this past week?
• What are emerging questions I have about my role, company, industry?
• Are there any comments / sentiments I can capture from conversations with my manager or other stakeholders on how things are going?
• What was my mood for the week? (on a scale from 😃 to 😫)

It’s a simple excel sheet that I fill out every Friday. I’ve done this for 15/18 weeks I’ve been working in the new role.

Here’s how I’ve found this helpful:

1. Factors affecting my mood: It’s been interesting to see what factors affect my mood at work — is the tasks I was working on, the feedback received from stakeholders or the nature of roadblocks I’ve overcome. It helps me understand my motivations and challenges and ensure I’m on accidentally over-indexing on either of them.
2. Recurring blockers: I’ve found recurring patterns in the blockers I’m experiencing week after week, giving me the insight I need to find resources, help or advice to tackle it.
3. Targeted learning: Having some data on how I’m doing has helped me set goals and figure on what kinds of learning and development options to take up in this role. I use a combination of my emerging questions and my blockers to map out a quick learning focus for the following week.

I’d recommend doing this kind of reflection weekly to gather the data you need to make intentional career decisions.