It's Time To Conduct a Quarterly Review

Four times a year, you have the opportunity to track your progress and adjust your trajectory.

While there are probably hundreds of ways to check in with yourself every quarter, I wanted to share how I do mine, in case you’re looking for some structure.

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Every 3 months, I start by updating my wheel of life.

It’s a circle with 9 slices, each labeled with a different area of my life. Each year I adjust what I want to focus on or change the wording. Currently, my categories are: Career, Family, Home, Finances, Writing, Rest, Learning, Community and Mind/Body.

In years past I’ve focused on health, art, saving, income, donation, relationships, self-care and more. Whatever you choose to focus on is up to you.

The wheel of life has 10 concentric circles inside as a scale of 1-10. In each slice, I fill in how “full” each of the slices are. Community gets a 4, career a 6… whatever I feel. Rarely does anything get a full 10.

Then, in a spreadsheet document that also has my goals, I go through slice by slice and just explain the rating. What’s going on in that area of my life right now? What could be better? What’s going well? What would I like to focus on or improve or stop? Each one is less than 5 sentences. Just a check-in.

Then I’ll write an overall check-in about where I am in my life right now.

The focus here is what do I want to keep focusing on and doing, and what do I want to change or stop?

That’s it.

Usually takes 30 minutes or so, I keep them all in the same place so I can quickly go back and quarter over quarter, scroll through the wheels to see how they’ve changed over the years.

You can download a PDF template for the Wheel of Life here.

What’s your process?

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Caveday is a company aimed at improving your relationship to work. We write regular posts on our blog and send out newsletters with productivity tips, life hacks, and recommendations. Sign up for the mailing list here.

Jake Kahana is a cofounder of Caveday. Sign up for his personal emails, called “The Email Refrigerator” here.