The Weekly Review Most Agents Have Never Actually Run

Almost every agent has sat through an annual review of some kind, whether with a broker, a coach or a spreadsheet on a quiet evening in January. Far fewer have ever run a review of a single week while that week was still close enough to remember accurately.

The annual version has a structural problem. By the time it happens, everything it uncovers is already twelve months old, and the small faults that caused the large numbers have had a year to repeat themselves undisturbed.

An annual review arrives too late to change anything

A year end review tells you what happened. It rarely tells you why, because nobody can reconstruct the detail of a March that ended nine months ago. You end up with totals and a theory. The theory is usually about the market, because the market is the only variable large enough to be visible from that distance.

A weekly review has the opposite property. The detail is still available. You can remember which call you did not make and what you did instead, and that is the level at which a business is actually fixed.

What a review is for, and what it is not for

A review is not a planning session and it is not a confession. Planning asks what you intend to do next. Reviewing asks what actually happened and whether it matches what you intended. Running the two together tends to mean the planning wins, because planning is more pleasant, and the week just finished goes unexamined.

It is also not a place to decide whether you are a good agent. That question produces heat and no information, and it tends to arrive at exactly the moment the review turns up something awkward. If you notice the review drifting towards a verdict on yourself, the useful move is to go back to the facts of the week and leave the verdict alone.

The three things a short review has to establish

Whatever format you use, a review that takes twenty minutes and still earns its place tends to answer the same three things:

• What did I commit to at the start of the week, stated precisely enough to be checked.
• What actually happened, in numbers rather than impressions.
• Where the two separated, and what was going on at the moment they separated.

The third one carries most of the value and is the one most often skipped. A gap between intention and outcome is not interesting on its own. What is interesting is the specific hour in which it opened.

Doing this on your own

None of this requires a team, and it is not a management exercise. An agent working alone has the same need and one additional difficulty, which is that there is nobody to notice the review has quietly stopped happening. That is worth planning for in advance rather than discovering in six weeks. A fixed time, a fixed place and a written record are duller than accountability from another person, and they survive longer.

A question to sit with this week

Think about the last time something in your week did not happen the way you meant it to. Can you name the point at which it changed, and what you were doing instead at that moment? If you cannot, what would you have needed to have written down on the day to be able to answer that now?

Where to take this next

If you want help building a review that you will actually keep running past the third week, book a discovery call and we will design one around how your week really works.