Reviews are indeed hard to do; you need to put effort into it to produce a valuable outcome. The goal of reviews should be to produce a list of potential changes that you can make IMO. In my experience, this requires:
- undistracted time
- willingness to make changes
- actually reading what you did every day for the last week/month/quarter (I often find out that my view of time is super distorted!)
- gradually investing into those changes (for me, my mind underestimates the reward of “meta changes” – changing medication, starting a new beeminder goal – all the stuff that will really matter to support other goals)
So, that’s hard focused time. The kind that you would put into your craft, not the kind that you spend watching an anime episode. Beeminder can help for the “applying changes I’ve decided for myself” part.
(That’s just from my experience though; maybe others don’t need as much investment to get benefits from this practice)
Done is better than nothing!
Analysis paralysis doesn’t get you anywhere. On the other hand, a simple “reflect” goal that forces you to think hard about the mistakes you made today and potential solutions, for 10mn, and write it in a journal is already probably going to get you dramatical changes.
My point is: be pragmatic. What is the end result for review practices for you specifically? For me, it’s both tracking what I do with my life and producing life changes way sooner than I would without reviewing and journaling. With this lens, writing becomes easier. Sometimes I stray away from this and end up summing up my week; but what I really want is to “rewrite myself”
Haha, I feel this. I’ve wasted tons of customer money early in my career because of this vice.
The solution seems to be to decide to do stuff that brings value first. The book that made me change is The Lean Startup and I can find a lot of this (perhaps even better) in Shape Up that I’m currently reading. I highly recommend the latter since it gives you strategies to cope with this specific problem.
Another way to tell it: if you are producing software, deliver from day 1. Don’t build thousands of lines of codes for software with tons of features but won’t really work because it wasn’t really focused on the right stuff.
For instance, on a personnal project, I’ve decided to onboard a customer. This will allow me to focus on what’s really important and not get lost into what my mind wants to do. Of course, there is nothing wrong in loosing yourself in rabbit holes, but it must be done with moderation (I’m literally in a position where I’m on the fence about building my own Chromium version; but the pragmatism that I’ve built made me able to avoid this. On the other hand, I’m missing out on valuable experience – but when does learning stops and actually building something useful starts? For me, building something useful seemed to never start. A life of learning is the dream, but a life where you have no creation that stands by itself is not desirable either. At least for me.)
ANOTHER example is making music. Making short loops and demos is fine, but the skill set required to make an entire track is different. So you have to force yourself to put out full tracks instead of 20s samples on SoundCloud; even if they sound super bad at first because you don’t know anything about song structures
(I’m roasting myself a lot in this message, sorry to hijack your thread 
)
Just my 2cents! I hope that I motivated you to make a change somewhere, like you did for me a few months ago 