Fifth Third Bank gave me a job and much more than that: it gave me a lesson in operational excellence.

Fifth Third had a strategic plan for the business, and I had one for my life. But while I put my plan in a notebook and left it in a drawer, Fifth Third worked its plan.

This I had never done.

Yes, I’d done project planning and execution, but this was different, broader.

Without fully operationalizing your Hand, all you have is a paper or digital file. Inactive. Useless. And here’s the cruel part: a waste of having created it.

I wish I’d done this sooner in my life, but too soon old and too late smart and all that, plus better late than never. What I do now is this:

Every Friday: I take a 90-minute block of time to review my week. Inputs are my:

❧ blank weekly review 1-pager. It includes a set of questions to ask myself, with space to write. It’s double-sided but only 1 page. The top of the 1-pager includes a list of my big three strategic goals for the year.

❧ iPad, open to my calendar for the week and with the app for my AI.

 ❧Magic of I planner. At the end of each day, I recap with four questions: 1. From the POV of the Hand, what is there to celebrate today? 2. Where did I ripple for good? 3. What am I thankful for? 4. What am I looking forward to tomorrow? You can use any four questions and you can change them whenever you like. The ‘ripple for good’ question is brand new (I’ll explain where it came from in the future).

In my weekly review, I work my way through each question on the 1-pager, which takes me into a process of planning the next week. I also look out four more weeks to see if there’s anything coming that I want/need to account for in my calendar. This is usually where I notice Roxie’s boarding for a weekend away needs to be booked.

Every Sunday: I take an hour to review my week ahead. I don’t just look at my calendar, I imagine myself going through the week. This usually leads to some tweaks to the plan.

At the end of the month: I do a monthly review, again using a template of questions. Usually, I do this right after my weekly review, but if I’m going out that evening, I’ll do it on Saturday or Sunday. Although I block 90 minutes for the monthly review, 60 minutes is usually enough because the weekly recaps are the input, so the weeks were already mentally processed. The big thing to look at in the monthly review is themes and trends.

Then, at the end of each quarter (March, June, September, December), I do a quarterly review, again using a 1-pager with questions. In March, I did the quarterly review on Sunday. In June, I did it on Friday, after the weekly and monthly and it was too much. I wanted a little mental breathing room.

At the end of the year there is of course the annual review and the upcoming year dreaming and planning. For that, I’ll use the tool I’ve been using for the last few years, the YearCompass.

Hmm. I have an idea! One of my friends is the best combo of strategic thinking and operational excellence I know. When I told her how I review my weeks/ months/ quarters, she just smiled—she’s been doing it for years.

I’m going to ask if she’d like to write a guest post for the end of the year, when it’s time to look back on the last and look forward to the next. Or maybe she’d like to write about her whole week/month/quarter/year process. Or maybe she’ll talk me through what she does, and I’ll write it up. We’ll find out!

Chewing the Cud of Good

Thankful for people who are experts in their fields.