My Winter Quarter Review and a Little Experiment with AI

An intriguing twist to my quarterly review - me, my memories, and shockingly insightful AI results

Author

Adam Moody
May 01, 2024

Bottom Line Up Front

I recently completed my quarterly review and added something to it using the hottest thing right now…

Yup, AI.

No, AI did not do my quarterly review for me, it did not complete my review in 30 seconds, and it did not make me want to stop doing it manually…

However, it did shed some significant insights into a few areas that helped me create some great action items and thoughts for review.

Things that I expect to give me great results in terms of time savings and revenue.

If you’re doing any sort of regular review to improve yourself and your results, or are considering starting then keep reading.

My inbox is open. As always, you can send feedback by hitting reply.

Where I Was

My quarterly review isn’t terribly complex and it takes place in two “locations”.

My calendar kicks it off with a few prep reminders and a link + instructions for doing the actual review in Roam Research.

The prep reminders are things like:

  • Review my “big wins” list

  • Review my weekly reviews - these are the more detailed entries that I do by answering 4 questions each week and help me look back over the past 90 days so that I’m not trying to brute force it by memory.

  • Review my daily entries - I answer a few questions in my daily template that are tagged so I can quickly visit the page and see all the entries. Here’s an example:

I think coffee might be on my mind in the morning…

Usually, I would open these up (via the links in my calendar event, to save time) and then peruse them to see what I’ve commented on over the past quarter.

What stood out, what was common, just a quick scan.

It worked but I recently I had been thinking about how to incorporate some AI tools into this to better spot gaps, patterns, and opportunities.

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Where I Went

It was good timing that I recently came across an article where the author had tried out exactly what I thinking about - taking lots of journal entries and asking for a review on patterns - specifically, asking something like this:

Here are a few journal entries about what I'm grateful for over a period of a few months. Can you help me find patterns that can help me make a breakthrough? Be honest and direct. Be specific, use examples, and provide a summary of your suggestions at the end.

That’s the exact prompt I used with GPT-4 and I was honestly shocked at how good the reply was, given my short daily entries in this area.

I tried it again with other questions like:

  • What's one thing you learned yesterday?

  • What am I avoiding that would bring me relief if I just did it?

  • What Is 1 Thing You Can Automate, Delegate, or Delete?

Pure gold.

Not only did I get some useful ideas and insights into my patterns, I got back actionable ways to improve.

Some weren’t things I would do, or want to do, but they at least gave me ideas on where to go from there.

What’s the catch?

I had to copy and paste all of the entries from Roam into TypingMind - a great “wrapper” I use for ChatGPT to store prompts and more.

What would I do differently?

If I wanted to speed up this review process, I would consider using Google Forms for answering my questions.

Why?

If I did it this way I could have the entries automatically added to a Google Sheet. I’ve used this method previously and shared that here.

When it’s time for a review, I can easily copy paste in seconds instead of minutes.

I’m going to wait on this and see if it’s something I continue to use, but based on the initial results, I’m thinking this is probably what I’ll do next quarter.

Extra Extra

  • After talking to Andrew on the latest podcast, I watched his Time Boss method overview. Some great methods and ideas in here.

  • As someone that writes frequently, it’s also a skill that I work on developing. Recently I went through the Doing Content Right book and took away some great insights and ideas. Highly recommend.

One quick question 👋

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That’s all for today, stay productive!

Adam Moody

P.S. Looking for resources to improve your productivity? Check out the tools I use right here.