Review Your Results
Too many of us spend too long getting things done and not enough time learning from what we’ve achieved (or not). This is tragic when you can review your results in two simple steps and dramatically improve your future performance.
Imagine this… You’ve just finished your work (your day, your project or your week) and you’ve got the result you want – great!
However, if you just stop there and go off to celebrate or jump straight into your next task, then you’ve wasted a big opportunity.
One of the key things we do every week in Project Done is to review your results. We do this in two simple steps.
1 Black and White Review
The first way we review your results is black and white. (We actually use Red or Green dots in Project Done – red = stop, green = go). Essentially we want to say:
- I got these sales
- I made these calls
- I did this…
- I got this result…
- I didn’t get this result…
This is important. We want to be black and white about the results we produced. We want to own our results. No fudging, no lying, no messing with your results.
2 Your Story Review
We also want to be very clear about what caused our results.
This is our chance to check in and find out what works and define it in a way that we can use again in the future. This is the key to continuous improvement. You do want to get more done with less effort in the future, right?
In contrast to our black and white results, you want to also review your results as a story or an insight into how those results were produced. We want to ask:
- How come I got that result this week?
- How come I didn’t get that result this week?
- What made the difference this week?
- If I wanted to repeat these results what would I do?
We want to learn from our efforts. We want to avoid one-hit-wonder results. We want to be able to produce predictable, reliable results.
We want to improve our performance over time – these simple two steps to review your results will help you do that.
Our story or insight might look like this:
- ‘Today I made a schedule.’
- ‘Today I stuck to my schedule.’
- ‘I left it to the last minute and didn’t get it done’
- ‘I let myself get distracted.’
- ‘I took on too many tasks.’
Essentially, you’re asking: What worked? Or, what didn’t?
Two Simple Steps
To recap, review your results in two simple steps:
- Be black and white results – you either got won the game or you have lost the game.
- And we want to have a story, an interpretation or an insight about what caused that result so we can do it again next time.
