How To: Quarterly Review
If you don’t know how you’re doing with your yearly goals how can you know if you’ll be able to achieve them? The truth is, you can’t.. and if you do happen to make progress and eventually achieve your goals, it’s by sheer dumb luck. The good news is that we have created this guide to walk you through your first quarterly review for the year.
We suggest doing this either the last week of March or the first week of April. Take some time to do it. You can do it in one day, but it’s better to spread it out and think about your answers in depth. Whichever way you decide to do it, just make sure you have set up some time when you won’t be distracted and can really dive deep.
For us, that looks like having a glass of water nearby, getting the noise-canceling headphones ready, and working in an area that offers back support.
If you’re all ready, let’s begin the exercise!
OVERVIEW
To overview the process, we like to start with reviewing the past quarter, analyzing & assessing the past quarter; identifying what we want for the next quarter. and then creating a plan of action.
To start we’re going to dive in just as we always do, by reviewing our Yearly Goal(s).
We like to write out our goals again at the top of the page so that we can refer back if need be throughout the whole review process.
It’s important to be as non-judgemental as you can be throughout this whole process. This is truly just a way to gauge how everything is going if your goals are aligned with how you want to feel, and what you may need to do in order to get where you want to be.
Quarterly Review Questions:
We like to use these questions for our Quarterly Reviews. Most of the time we pick 3-5 questions that resonate from each category.
Review (looking at the past quarter)
What are our goals for this year?
How are you feeling rn? (Energized, burnt out, anxious,)
How have you spent your free time?
What are you proud of?
Choose a word to describe the 1st quarter of the year.
Assess (Analyzing the past quarter)
What are you grateful for this past quarter?
What’s been hard about your goals? What’s been easy with your goals?
What challenges have you faced?
How did you overcome those challenges?
Have your goals generated the feeling you want to feel? If not, take a look at your goals and see how you can shift them to be a more accurate reflection of how you want to feel.
What would have made this last quarter really excellent that you were maybe missing?
How confident do you feel in your progress towards your goals?
Do the things you do daily align with the life you envision creating? If yes, how so? If not, how so?
What lessons did you learn this past quarter?
What has made you feel fulfilled?
Identify (Figure out what you are feeling now after the quarter has ended and how you want to feel for the future)
Have the goals for the year been completed? If so, choose some more goals for the next quarter OR expand upon the goals that you have completed.
How has working on your goals made you feel?
What are you looking forward to in the next quarter?
How do you want to feel at the beginning, middle, and end of this quarter?
What do you need physically, emotionally, and spiritually?
How do you want to show up in this next quarter?
What is your top priority?
Plan of Action: (Next Quarter Planning)
Using the answers you provided to the questions above, create a plan of action to guide you through this next quarter.
Choose which goals you will focus on for the next 3 months.
Break the goal into steps that can be completed each week.
Set a brief timeline of when you wish to accomplish each goal based on how many steps you’ve broken the goal into.
Set periodic check-in times throughout the next quarter to see how you’re doing with goals and make adjustments to your plan of action if need be,
Start making moves!
We’ve tried to keep this blog post brief so that you dedicate more of your time to doing the quarterly check-in than you do reading this blog post 😅 We hope it was helpful for you to see a bit more into our process of doing quarterly check-ins.
Wishing you oodles of joy!
