Hey :)

I did Sahil Bloom's quarterly review this week. Specifically the first exercise — the traffic light one.

I did it in a cafe, on my phone, scrolling back through my calendar. Took maybe 20 minutes. Probably less.

The exercise is simple. You go back through your calendar and label things red, yellow, or green.

That's it. Who you spent time with, what meetings you were in, what you were actually doing — just pop them in one of the three columns and see what emerges.

The prerequisite, obviously, is that your calendar is a reasonably honest record of how you actually spent your time. This is one of the real benefits of living in your calendar — when you look back, you've got something to look at. 

I also go back and update mine retrospectively. If a meeting ran long, or an ad hoc thing came up, I'll change it to reflect what the day actually looked like. End of the day, sometimes end of the week. It makes the calendar useful as a reflection tool, not just a planning tool.

If you use colours for different types of work — I've got pink for client work, grey for internal, yellow for personal — you can glance at a week and get a quick read on it. Makes the exercise even faster.

The thing I wanted to add, because I think it's easy to miss, is this: don't go too binary with what you find.

We tend to approach these things in ones and zeros. Red means cut it. But that's not always right. Sometimes something is draining energy not because it's wrong, but because you're not yet good at it. There's a competence gap. And if you eliminate it, you might be cutting something that's actually important to you — you just haven't got confident in it yet.

Dan Sullivan calls this A, B, C work — A being irritating, B being okay, C being fascinating. Same idea. The goal isn't just to eliminate A. Sometimes A becomes C once you stop being bad at it.

So when you find something in the red, ask two questions:

Less of this, more of that. That framing is usually more useful than cut or keep.

If the exercise resonates, Sahil's full quarterly review template goes deeper — link here. Worth a look. None of these frameworks are complete or perfect, but they give you something to push against.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.