With new technologies, frameworks, libraries emerging all the time, the field of software development is continually evolving. Make yourself accountable to ensure consistent self-improvement, maintain momentum, make lasting progress, and form habits, such as writing down thoughts, organizing them into actionable items, and engaging in deep work.

Make yourself accountable

Priorities change and your second brain should reflect that. Reviewing your PKM enables you to see what needs to be adjusted in order to continue improving. To keep yourself accountable, review and update your system daily, weekly, and quarterly.

Daily Reviews

These check-ins are like daily standups with yourself and ensure you’re on a good track pushing your goals forward.

To adjust and prioritize daily:

Review your calendar for today
Review your tasks and progress for today:
1. Check off tasks that you have already completed
2. Choose your MIT and make sure you’ll have enough time to complete it
3. Batch boring tasks together into one time block
4. Discard or reschedule irrelevant tasks

Adjust your plan as needed if you are falling behind on your tasks, or if your priorities have changed.. Doing daily reviews will help you gain a more realistic perspective on how much you can accomplish, and over time, you’ll understand yourself better. This review could be done each morning before starting work, or late in the evening to target the following day.

Weekly Review

Weekly review serves as a means to get your head empty again by going through all four phases of the acreom method. You know you're done when you can honestly say, ”I absolutely know right now everything I'm not doing but could be doing if I decided to”.

Weekly review is a way to keep your cognitive load low, and at the same time give you a feeling of being in control of all your “stuff”. It could be done on a Friday afternoon at the end of the workweek, or on long commutes home.

Go through your tasks.
1. Do I need to add it to a specific Page?
2. Is it still relevant? (If not, delete it)
3. What would I like to work on next week? (Schedule it)
Go through your calendar for next week.
Schedule and time block for deep work. Time block space during the week for deep work and fill up the space left with other things accordingly. It is a good idea to block the times when you feel the most productive (e.g. 10am-12pm, or 3pm-5pm). No need to specify tasks, just make yourself some space.
Go through your last weeks' My days, check progress on active projects, and archive when they no longer feel relevant.
Go through your Tasks and remove, schedule, or assign Tasks to Pages.

Quarterly Review

This review can help you see the big picture and understand how your various projects conform to your overall goals. Doing quarterly reviews can help you get a better sense of your priorities and focus your efforts on the most meaningful things. One way to do this is by creating a Page with your yearly projects and priorities, both in your personal and professional life. The projects each could have their own Page and the quarterly review needs just to link these Pages - allowing you to carry projects between quarters.

Pro tip: If you're not sure where to start, try creating a page and writing down how your last quarter went and where you'd like to go next. Go through your pinned Pages and understand how it fits the big picture of your life.

Clean up

After you finish a project, go through your Page and clean up the unnecessary notes, or unfinished thoughts. Uncluttered Pages are easily searchable and can serve as documentation, which you can rely on in the future and share with your colleagues. It is a great opportunity to find any missing pieces in your knowledge, test your understanding, and gain new perspectives.

Many people end up with irrelevant knowledge without relation. Get rid of it.

Do you find this useful? please drop us a comment in discord community or write to team[at]acreom[dot]com

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