It's Sunday, so I did my Weekly Review today.

Last week was a barnburner -- one of the most productive "normal weeks" I've had in recent history. A week at a conference or the culmination of a huge event might be highly productive, but I size those up a little differently than a week where I'm just going through the standard sets of work I typically do without some large external happenings.

Last week, an incredibly large amount of good and important things got done.

Thus, I was excited to review the week. How'd this happen? Why'd it go so well? What can I learn from it?

I'll give you the spoiler right now: 13 hours of great work accounted for just about all of the results this week.

My weeks start on Sunday and end on Saturday, which I think is infinitely more sane than the standard Monday->Sunday weeks that start with too many Monday to Friday days in a row and ends with too much weekend.

So we're talking about Sunday 17 January to Saturday 23 January.

Interestingly, surprisingly, Sunday the 17th did not at all start like a "traditionally productive day" would -- I screwed off to start the day... here's my notes:

[Woke 7:30AM… followed Patriots/Chiefs game while making breakfast and coffee, didn’t do much to start day]

I then did morning stuff and caught up on some little details until 10AM, and didn't start working until 10:25AM.

I normally try to wake at 3:55AM, ideally, 6:55AM at the latest, and get to work within about 45 minutes. So starting the day (1) later than normal and (2) following football (it's on in the morning in China) is not normally a great start.

I didn't get to real work until 10:25AM.

Then I did this:

10:25AM to 11:10AM: Studying my ops / notes / brainstorming what needs improvement

and this:

11:10AM to ~12:10PM: Working on ops more, starting new Master SOD

and lunch, and this:

12:50PM to 1:15PM: Working on SOPs

followed by more decent but not great quality time:

1:20PM to 1:35PM: 15 minute nap
1:35PM to 1:50PM: Habits, cleaning.
[1:50PM to 3:30PM: Web surfing. Blah.]
[3:30PM to 4PM: Walking]
4PM to 4:05PM: Trying to do more ops; confused; switching gears
4:05PM to 4:30PM: Weekly Review complete + updated Jan personal finance numbers.

followed by this:

4:30PM to 5:30PM: Journal entry, working on Theory of Defense, writing Defenses for current goals, added new Omnifocus category (Dispatch+Bonus)
5:30PM to 5:40PM: Documenting some of gains just made.
5:40PM to 5:50PM: Weekly Plan finished; Copy/Paste/Do elaborated

So that was Sunday. About 3.5 hours of planning and studying what's already going on. The amount of time I spent on important stuff was outpaced by miscellany (cooking, walking, cleaning) and even outpaced by doing distraction stuff like just surfing the web or following football.

I would traditionally not mark a day that had more distraction in it than focused work as a great day, and yet...

Here's how the numbers shook out for the week, which doesn't count some middle of the road type activities like research, email, and general stuff:

Approximately 13 hours of working on really great stuff
Looking at my calendar, I had 12 appointments scheduled accounting for about 10 hours.
I had another 10+ hours of face to face meetings that hadn’t been scheduled.

Here's the realization: all the gains came from setting up, and then doing surprisingly short blocks of great work.

On the Tuesday the 19th, for instance, I had 5+ hours of calls and appointments spread over from 9AM to 4PM -- not a formula for a highly productive day.

And yet, I got one really great stretch in, from 12:15PM to 1:50PM, that was breakthrough.

Thursday the 21st, I didn't get any big or great work done -- at 2:55PM, I'd been doing a mix of trivial stuff and having been off track when I went for a long walk.

I was originally going straight to the gym, but after a couple hours of walking, I had some ideas and stopped off at Starbucks, and worked from 4:15PM to 7:20PM in an inspired flow.

If not for those 3 hours, that day would have been "blah" -- with those 3 hours, it was maybe the single best day I've had yet in 2016.

This is somewhat remarkable to think about -- of the 168 hours last week, 13 of them spent excellently made the week incredibly productive.

In the past, I've sometimes focused on tracking how I spend my time minute to minute, and sometimes focused on tracking what I achieved in a day in terms of outcomes.

As silly as it sounds, this week is the first time I've rigorously done both... usually when I track time in great detail, I rank how good the time was and focus on spending time better in general.

I think that's perhaps led me in the past to not rapidly and desperately fast blitz out needed outcomes.

This week I got a lot done in odd lots of time, not something I used to be good at.

I didn't have much time on a few of the days, and yet I moved something big forward in blocks ranging from as small as 10 minutes to the largest block of 3 straight good hours.

This is making me rethink productivity a bit.

First, a day with the first 12 hours being useless web surfing, distraction, and miscellany can be turned around by just rapidly marching out a few outcomes.

This requires, though, getting out of a "working is virtuous" Protestant work ethic type mindset, and get into just rapidly tearing into things, dispatching them, and creating outcomes.

"A few great hours are where the huge gains come from" doesn't seem like some huge revelation -- I probably always knew that.

But I was missing its corollary: non-destructive mediocre hours aren't the problem as long as those few great hours happen.

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PS: Are posts like this interesting to you? A surprisingly large number of people have said over email that they liked my now-years-ago posting of notes from my weekly reviews, habits spreadsheets, etc. Let me know.