Put one appointment in the diary.
When you're busy running a business, it's easy to spend the entire week responding. Messages, decisions and customer questions fill the gaps. The work that could make next week easier gets pushed into next week.
Give yourself 15 minutes at the same time each week. Keep the review short enough that you'll actually do it. Use the same questions every time so you can see changes, rather than starting from scratch.
Five minutes: what happened?
Choose a handful of measures that reflect your business. Depending on how you operate, that could be qualified enquiries, sales, gross margin, cash collected, outstanding invoices or delivery problems. Use actual figures where you have them. Write down what you don't yet know.
Then ask: what moved in the right direction, what didn't, and what is the most likely explanation? Avoid treating a single unusual week as a trend.
Five minutes: where did you get stuck?
Think about the decisions that came back to you repeatedly. Look for the repeated interruption, the unclear responsibility or the customer issue that could have been dealt with earlier.
Pick one. You are looking for something you can change, rather than building another list of everything that's wrong.
Five minutes: what happens next?
Set no more than three priorities for the week ahead. Give each one an owner and a date. If the action is "improve sales", make it smaller: "Review the last ten enquiries and agree a follow-up owner by Tuesday" is something you can actually complete.
A useful review ends with a decision that changes the week ahead.
Your weekly review sheet
Print this page or download the plain-text worksheet. Keep completed reviews together so you can see what's changing.
Make it a habit before making it bigger.
You don't need a complicated dashboard to begin. Start with a page, a few reliable figures and the discipline of coming back to it. Once the habit is useful, improve the information that supports it.