How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

Today on ProductivityCast we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done so you can review and reflect, and then get back to getting things done better. It’s halfway through the year and so it’s a good time to discuss the mid-year review. A mid-year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take the time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause, step back, and gain clarity on where we stand in relation to our aspirations and how we can make the most of the second half of the year.

Correction: Ray said “weekly review” at the start of the episode when he actually meant “mid-year review.”

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In this Cast | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | How to Conduct a Mid-Year Review

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Reticular activating system (RAS)

The biggest myths about emotions, debunked | Lisa Feldman Barrett

Antifragility

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:18
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:22
I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:24
I’m Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:26
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast. Today, on ProductivityCast, we’re going to be talking about stepping away from getting things done for a bit, so we can review and reflect. And what I mean by that is that we’re halfway through the year. And this is a really good time for us to discuss the mid year review. A mid year review is a practice like any other reflection activity, where we take time to look over our progress, reevaluate our goals, and really recalibrate our personal productivity systems. It’s a moment to pause the back and gain clarity, gain perspective on where we stand in relationship to our aspirations, and how we can make the most of the second half of our calendar year. So let’s talk today about what the [mid-year] review is to each of us on because it may be different. We’ll then talk a little bit about why why someone should do a mid year review. And perhaps why not, I mean, there may be some folks who don’t do it, and therefore giving some perspective there. And then we’ll talk about some of the elements of our own media reviews. And perhaps how you can get started developing your own video review. If you haven’t done one before, we’re just kicking the tires, and making your mid year review better. So let’s talk first about what is a mid year review. I kind of gave a definition in our preamble. But if you want to give some further color to it, what do you think the video review is to you?

Augusto Pinaud 1:53
Okay, we all have, you know, our reticular system activated by the means is our brain is like a scanner. And he’s paying attention to what we what we do what we are down, we want to know what direction we’re taking. If you don’t set that scanner in any direction, well, it doesn’t matter, it will scan something, but is that Samsung? What do you want. One of the things that I believe is important is to track that word did you want to go on it is still something that is valid that is interesting is there is nothing wrong in to change the direction. What is wrong is to in my perspective, is to walk aimlessly and just moving and seeing what is happening. So I have been personally on truck and off truck for both. And in my experience on truck is way more fun. So that’s part of the reason why I conduct this MC gear reviews and why I work with my clients, the clients that I have coached in to do this review and why I believe is very, very important. It is very simple to lose track. But it’s also easy to get back on it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14
As a sidestep just to clarify for some folks, what Lisa was talking about was the reticular activating system. And so this is a neural network in in our brain, right we have a neural network. And the RAS is responsible for a wide variety of things. And some of those things, of course, are our ability to identify patterns of things. It also regulates our wakefulness, it regulates our ability to basically have a consciousness, motivation, all kinds of other things. It’s also the thing that identifies our fight or flight response or flight flight freeze response. And it’s really how we perceive the world. So a lot of that RAS is activated, those network of neurons are really activated when we’re trying to identify patterns of things. So you know, when we see something that shaped like a lion, moving toward us, whether it’s a lion or not, our RAS kicks in, and we start to respond from a biological perspective, right, we prepare for fight or flight, because of our mind, surfacing those stimuli, we get activated for preparation for whatever that thing is. So just want to make sure folks are kind of on the same page when when we talk about the RAS,

Art Gelwicks 4:22
the mid year review, in my estimation is one of those things that becomes a necessary evil for many people because that they get so involved in the work and doing the work, that they haven’t got a running time period, they may not even do weekly reviews of going through and determining where they stand and where things are. I also think it’s a bigger review though. It’s the it’s the review that determines Are you on course, it’s not for minor course adjustments, but is your destination the correct destination. So for me, it’s always a matter of not only of determining Are you making progress on the goals that you’ve set Get out. But it’s an opportunity to say, okay, based on where the world stands right now, where my world stands right now, are those the right goals? Are those the opportunities that I want to be pursuing are those the objectives that I need to have at this point in time. That’s not something you want to do on a weekly basis, because you’ll never get out of the analysis mode. But this is very much in my mind, the opportunity to do a strategic analysis of what your goals and objectives are.

Francis Wade 5:30
And I’d be the contrarian here, or the devil’s advocate. For a change,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:36
surprise, surprise,

Art Gelwicks 5:39
that’s my job.

Francis Wade 5:40
I’m taking art putting on our chat for a while, I don’t do a video review. And I know that the logical that I should do one. But here’s why. I have three kinds of interests in the in our business. And we cover three web three conferences per year, one in productivity, the other one in strategy and another one in Caribbean HR. And they they go from March, March, June, and September. And we have our strategic plan for each one. And we gotten into the practice of updating the strategic plan after each conference. So we’re, we don’t quite review them because they don’t follow the calendar. But we do three rounds of strategic planning each year, to focus on each business. Invariably, for example, the strategic planning conference is coming up this week, probably next week, or the week after, we’ll do a review, or we’ll do a new plan for the next year. But we’ll also review the other plans. So we don’t really have a media review. receipts, not a not, not the way that you traditionally think of it, we we do forward planning for each each of the three businesses, so to speak, or interests. And in that we tend to cover the wall cannibal overlook, look over the wall, all three are doing. So not really. But in a way, I guess something similar gets done. This doesn’t follow the calendar, that’s for sure,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:21
I’ll offer a different perspective here, which is not counter to what Francis is talking about. But more from, from my perspective, I am a natural planner. So I could plan all the time, all the all the ways and do nothing, right? That woul