The Weekly Review

A few months back, Jean starting a journey of journaling with a goal of making it a daily habit. After an uneven start, she received some advice to try during a two month experiement. In this episode, Jean reports on her progress. Also, James ends up doing a panoply of weekly todos all in one week.

James talks about a large Black Friday purchase he is making. Jean will not go Black Friday shopping without a specific list, or otherwise she’ll buy things she doesn’t actually need. Dexter the Cat is unmoved. 😼

In this episode Jean and James both talk about unexpected travel plans due to family matters. The conversation turns to not always knowing the correct course of action, especially as events are unfolding. A trusted system can track the actions you want to accomplish—but we still need to do the work of deciding what those actions should be.

In observance of the holiday, James and Jean discuss some hacks for Halloween. Figurative hacks only! 🪓 We also reveal our favorite Halloween treats and films.

This week Jean talks about a book she read recently about managing your home and how it resonated with her. The author, who also writes the blog aslobcomesclean.com, does not claim to be a guru, just someone sharing her insights of things that work or don’t work for her—a philosophy shared by The Weekly Review. Also Jean and James are happily surprised someone left a review of the podcast!

How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind - Dana K. White

James talks about the advantages of his digital photos, the collection that never needs dusting and never takes over the dining room table. Jean had a flashback to her attempt to pare down her contacts. And we have some Siri silliness at the end. 🤖

Jean and James revisit the topic of habits as Jean tries to establish a regular practice of journaling. Jean describes a new habit-tracking app as well as her idea for an extremely focused, simple habit app. James realizes that he continues to form habits—just not the ones he would like. Jean’s nephew has a comment about her use of Chuck and James talks a bit about the OmniFocus 4 beta.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Good Habits, Bad Habits by Wendy Wood

James and Jean talk about how things get done even if they don’t necessarily make it to our to-do lists or our trusted systems, and James reports on how his experiment in paring down Active Projects is going.

In this episode Jean describes how she uses the app Due in her productivity workflow and her weekly MEOW. She also talks about a wonderful related discovery she made just before recording the episode. James compares and contrasts his process with Jean’s. Plus, now that they both have a iPhone 14 Pro, James recaps the features to help Jean impress her nephews.

Due App for iOS

In this grab-bag episode, Jean and James talk about a variety of topics. Jean continues to refine and formalize her M.E.O.W system for doing a weekly review—see the show notes for a link to her blog post about it. Disney fan James attended the D23 Expo and gives a report of his experiences there. And Jean talks about how some tasks, like her recent need to recover from a laptop mishap, are difficult to interleave with other activities and require a focused block of time.

Jean’s M.E.O.W. System