What keeps coming back? A monthly look-back
What it does: once a month, you look back at four weeks together. What you get: the jobs and arguments that keep returning, and one setup fix for each. About 20 minutes a month
Once a month, together, you take a gentle look back at four weeks of logs to find the jobs that keep slipping, and fix the setup instead of patching it again.
What keeps coming back, so far
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Do it monthly, not weekly.
Some patterns only show up across a month. You need your four weekly logs from Who did what and your One owner per job list on hand.
Dig deeper: what the look-back is for -
List the jobs that slipped.
Write down every job that was noticed but not done, or only done after being raised more than once, in any week. Check off each week it happened. Three or four checks is a real pattern, not a fluke.
Dig deeper: gathering the month’s notes -
Sort each repeat into one of three kinds.
No clear owner, or the named owner isn’t the one doing it: update your job list. The owner can’t keep up: have a kind, honest conversation. A temporary cause like illness or travel: note it and move on.
Dig deeper: sorting each gap -
Wrap it up and keep count.
Make the changes, set a time for any conversation you need, and write down how many jobs had no clear owner. Fewer each month means it is working. More just means something bigger changed, and it’s worth a talk.
Dig deeper: wrapping up the look-back -
Nobody owes anything.
Past hours don’t get charged to anyone. A job with no owner is a gap in the list, not a judgment on whoever kept covering it.
Dig deeper: what the look-back is not for
Try this: Put a date in the calendar for the end of this month, and keep your weekly logs until then.
Fill it in on screen and save a PDF →
Goes with Chapter V: The monthly look-back · Your progress, week by week · Do all your sheets in one place
What’s this?
On the full version and on the PDF, this sheet is called WP-04. It puts one of the site’s Five Pillars (the five big ideas everything here is built on) to work: fix the setup, not the person: repeat problems get fixed in the setup, not pinned on someone.