How to do a quarterly life review in 60 minutes (free template)
A personal quarterly review is the one habit that kept my life tracking useful for years. Here is the 60-minute version I run every quarter, with a free template you can copy today.
By Henrique Pacheco, Founder of Good Work
Every three months, in the first week of the new quarter, I sit down with a coffee, my tracked numbers and one page of questions. An hour later I know what actually improved, what quietly slipped, and the two or three things I'm going to change. That's it. No retreat, no 40-page workbook, no mood board.
I've done a quarterly review in some form since 2017, first from a bullet journal, then from a big Google Sheet, and now from Good Work. The format below is the one that survived. It takes about 60 minutes, and it works whether your data lives in an app, a spreadsheet, or your memory.
If you want the short version: download the free template and come back for the why.
Why a quarter, and not a week or a year
Daily and weekly check-ins are for noticing. A yearly review is for dreaming. A quarter is the only window where you can see a real trend and still do something about it before the year is gone.
Twelve or thirteen weeks is long enough that one bad week doesn't dominate the picture. It's short enough that "I'll fix my sleep" can turn into a plan with a deadline you'll actually meet. And the calendar helps you: the first days of January, April, July and October, once the quarter has actually ended and all its numbers are in, are natural moments to stop and look back.
The other reason is kinder. A quarterly view forgives. When our baby was born, my exercise numbers fell off a cliff for two months. In a streak app that's a failure. In a quarterly review it was one line: "Exercise: down, expected, revisit in Q1." The number was honest and so was the context.
Before you start: gather the numbers
Memory is a poor witness to a quarter. Ask yourself how you slept over the last three months and what you'll actually answer is how you slept over the last two weeks, because the recent past crowds out everything before it. A good fortnight makes the whole quarter feel good, a bad one makes it feel wasted, and neither is the truth. A few numbers written down as they happened are the only defence against that bias. They remember July the way it was, not the way September makes it feel. That's why I measure things at all, and why the review starts with data.
You don't need much: one or two numbers per area of life you care about, for this quarter and the previous one. Start with what you already have. Your phone has been counting your steps, a watch or a smart scale may have your sleep and weight, your bank app knows what you saved, and your calendar remembers who you saw. Steps, sleep, workouts, family dinners, deep-work hours, savings rate, books read: that kind of thing.
If you track in a spreadsheet, add a column that averages each metric for the quarter. If you track in Good Work, the Trends report already has these side by side, with each metric marked On track, Improving, Flat, Declining or Off track against the previous quarter. If you track nothing yet, estimate honestly and write "estimate" next to it. That's fine for a first review, and it's the best argument for tracking a few things next quarter.
Finally, dig out last quarter's review if you have one. Step 1 starts with it.
The 60-minute quarterly review
Six steps. The whole thing comfortably fits in an hour, and if you tend to spiral, a timer per step helps. But the hour is a guide, not the ritual. What matters is that you get through all six steps, and especially to step 6, which is the one people skip.
1. Check in on last quarter's focus points
Open the previous review and go straight to the focus points you set at the end of it. For each one, give a verdict: kept, partly, or missed. One word, before you look at anything else, because the temptation later will be to explain the misses away.
- Meditate on at least half the days: kept (58%).
- Cook dinner at home four nights a week: partly (3.2/week, the new project ate the Thursdays).
- No screens in the bedroom: missed (lasted until the World Cup).
Then answer any questions you left for yourself. "Did the morning routine survive the new job?" is much easier to answer honestly three months later than it was to predict.
If this is your first review, this step is empty. That's fine. It's the reason to do a second one.
2. Lay out the milestones
A milestone is anything that happened to your life, on a day or over a stretch of days. A holiday. A new job. Two weeks of flu. A baby. A house move. A big deadline. Write down the quarter's milestones in order, with their dates, so the quarter has a shape before you look at a single number. Your calendar and your photos will remind you of most of them.
- 1–19 Jul: World Cup, late kick-offs.
- 6–13 Jul: family holiday.
- 20 Jul: new project at work starts.
- 18–24 Aug: flu.
Milestones are what turn a line on a chart into a story. Without them, every dip looks like a failure of will.
3. Read the numbers, no judgement
Go through each area and write one line per metric: what it was last quarter, what it is now, and the direction. Don't explain anything yet. Just the facts.
- Sleep: 6.9h → 7.3h, up.
- Workouts: 2.4/week → 1.1/week, down.
- Family dinners: 4/week → 5/week, up.
- Savings rate: 18% → 18%, flat.
This block is deliberately boring. Boring is what keeps it honest.
4. What went well?
Pick the three lines that improved or held steady in a way you're happy about. For each one, answer a single question: what made it work?
Be specific. "I slept more" isn't an answer. "I moved my phone charger to the kitchen in July" is. You're looking for the mechanism, because you'll want to protect it next quarter.
5. What slipped, and why?
Now the lines that went down. For each, ask two questions:
- Was this a choice or a drift? A choice ("I stopped running to spend evenings with the baby") is fine and needs no fixing. A drift ("I don't know when I stopped reading") is where the useful work is.
- What was the first week it dropped? Look at the data if you have it, cross reference with your milestone list for that week. More often than not the cause is sitting right there.
This summer my sleep dropped well under seven hours for a few weeks, and I didn't need to think hard about why: the World Cup was on, and the matches where I live finished late. The workouts stopped the week the new project started. The reading happened only during my vacation, but never came back. A dip that lines up with a milestone is explained, and explained is different from broken.
Resist the urge to fix everything. Write down the drifts, note the cause, and move on. You'll choose what to fix in step 6.
6. Set the focus for next quarter
This is the whole point of the review, and the part most people skip because the reflecting felt like enough.
Pick at most three focus points. Not goals, exactly. Each one should name a metric and a direction, so the next review can tell you whether it happened.
Next quarter I will:
- Get workouts back above 2 per week (run twice, Tuesdays and Saturdays).
- Keep sleep above 7 hours (protect the phone-in-the-kitchen rule).
- Read 3 books (20 minutes before bed, replaces scrolling).
Three is a limit, not a target. One is fine. Anything past three and none of them happen.
Under the focus points, write one or two questions for your next review: things you can't answer yet, but will be able to in three months. "Did the morning routine survive the new job?" "Was the gym membership worth it?" Your next step 1 opens with these.
Finally, write one sentence that summarises the quarter, the kind of thing you'd want to read in a year's time. Put the review somewhere you'll find it, because your next review starts with reading this one.
Mine from Q2 2026, which saw our family moving back home after temporarily moving out due to a home renovation, reads: "Staying alive and sane — home and health back to normal, money didn't."
What to do with the review afterwards
Two things, and both are small:
- Make the focus points visible. Put them on the first page of your notebook, at the top of your spreadsheet, or pinned on your dashboard. If they disappear, they don't happen.
- Put the next review in your calendar now. First week of January, an hour, coffee. In my experience, the reviews that happen are the ones that were already in the calendar.
Don't rewrite your whole tracking system after the review. If a metric turned out to be useless, drop it. If one was missing, add it. That's enough change for a quarter.
Mistakes I made so you don't have to
Reviewing without last quarter's numbers. My first few reviews compared this quarter to how I felt about the previous one. I was always improving. I wasn't.
Tracking too much. For about a year I had 30 metrics. The review took an afternoon and I dreaded it. Ten is plenty; five is enough to start.
Treating every dip as a problem. The quarter after our baby was born, I wrote a plan to get every metric back up. It lasted a week. Some dips are the right call. Say so and move on.
Reviewing the numbers without the milestones. For years I looked at the charts alone and spent half the review trying to remember why August was so bad. Now the milestones go down first, and the numbers make sense on the first read.
Skipping the review when the quarter was bad. Those are the reviews that matter most, and the ones I learned the most from. A bad quarter with a review is a lesson. A bad quarter without one is just a bad quarter.
The free quarterly review template
The six steps, from last quarter's check-in to next quarter's focus points, on one page as a plain text file. Copy it into your notes app or print it, and reuse it every quarter.
Download the free template
If you'd rather not build the spreadsheet
I ran this review from a spreadsheet for seven years, and the part that always took longest was step zero: pulling the quarter's numbers together and lining them up against the previous quarter.
That's the part Good Work does for you. You log a handful of metrics through the quarter, in a few seconds a day, and add a milestone whenever something happens: a holiday, a new job, a week of flu. Once the quarter has ended, the Trends report lays every metric out against the previous quarter, marks what's on track, what's improving and what's declining, and shows which metrics moved during each milestone, so the "why" in step 5 is already on the page. The review itself lives right next to it and opens the way step 1 does, by checking in on the focus points and questions you set last time, marked kept, partly or missed against the real numbers. No streaks, no guilt, just the picture.
If you're starting from nothing, start with three metrics: sleep, one workout a week, and dinner with the people you love. That's enough for your first review in early January, when Q4 is done.
→ Build your dashboard, free — free plan, no credit card. Quarterly reports are part of Premium, which includes a 30-day trial.
Thanks for reading, Henrique