A smart man once said, “The unexamined life isn’t worth living” and in response to that someone else (at least once) declared “The unplanned life isn’t worth examining”.
Borrowing the idea of a retrospective from my day job in software development, I introduced the concept of “an hour of Dennis” (*).
My basic premise is this: A week has 168 hours in it. Spend 167 of those hours living your life, but take one hour on a Sunday morning to sit down with a fancy coffee drink and…
- Review how the last week unfolded.
- Identify what worked, what didn’t, what I’d like to change, and what I want to keep.
- Look toward the upcoming week and jot down aspirations for what I’d like to do differently.
Looking back, protecting this one hour has been the most impactful thing I’ve done in learning how to lead myself. It is essentially my version of Stephen Covey’s habit of “sharpening the saw”—a forced pause to step back and separate the signal from the noise.
Sometimes that means mapping out a tactical plan for the week. Other times, it’s just me staring at a blank page in my journal asking: What are my goals? Do I have goals? Do I even need goals? What’s a goal? Why am I here? Why are any of us here?
* - inspired by Seinfeld’s “The Summer of George”