Schedule One Hour to Review Your Habits and Decisions

This week has been about self-leadership — the habits I model without meaning to, the standards I set just by repeating them. Today is the practical bit. Not another idea to sit with. One hour, one fix, done this week.

Here’s what that looked like for me last month. I sat down and went back through the last couple of weeks with one client, and found four small extra tasks I’d just quietly absorbed — a report reformatted, a call taken that wasn’t on the agreed schedule, a template rebuilt from scratch because it was faster than explaining why it wasn’t in scope. None of them were disasters on their own. Stacked together, they were a week of unpaid, unplanned work I’d said yes to without ever actually deciding to.

The honest cause wasn’t that I’m bad at boundaries, or too generous, or any of the stories I might have reached for. It was simpler and more fixable than that: I had no pause built in between a request landing and me saying yes. No moment to check it against scope before my hands were already doing it. The fix wasn’t a difficult conversation about being taken advantage of. It was giving myself the half a day before responding to anything that felt like “just a small extra,” so agreeing to it became a decision instead of a reflex.

That’s the whole method, really. Block the hour first, properly, on the calendar, not as a vague intention. Go back over the last couple of weeks and find the habit costing you the most — not the easiest one to admit to, the one actually costing you time, trust, or energy. Be specific about what’s really driving it, because the honest cause is usually smaller and more boring than the story you’ve been telling yourself. Then make one change. Not a system overhaul. One pause built into a workflow, one template, one conversation you’ve been avoiding, one delegation you keep meaning to make.

The part people skip is the doing of it. It’s easy to identify the fix and never schedule the time to actually make it. Treat that hour the way you’d treat a client commitment — booked, protected, shown up for — because if it keeps losing to whatever feels urgent that day, it never happens at all.

Afterwards, notice what changed. Doesn’t need to be a formal review. One sentence is enough: what’s different now, and what would have kept happening if I hadn’t done this. That sentence is what turns a one-off fix into evidence that the hour was worth protecting again next month.

Your turn: what’s the one hour you’re booking this week, and what’s the habit it’s finally going to fix?