I’ve been doing quarterly reviews as a part of David Sparks’ Productivity Field Guide role-based system since January 2021, but I’ve never had a review as thorough and enjoyable as the one I did with Claude Cowork last month.
Cowork strips the drudgery out of the quarterly review: it handles the calendar scanning, reading three months of journal entries that I never actually reread, and reading my daily notes, weekly, monthly, and last-quarter reviews. It gives me that information precisely when I need it during my review.
In doing so, it makes the review both less painful and genuinely better. Working from the record rather than memory gives me a more accurate role assessment, helps me think more freely, and even makes the process fun.
I Won’t Sell You on Quarterly Reviews (David Sparks Already Did)
I’m not going to go into the values of doing quarterly reviews here. I’ve written about it before in my blog post, “The Power of Quarterly and Weekly Reviews.”
In the Productivity Field Guide, David Sparks argues that the time you spend doing a quarterly review makes the next 90 days much more productive. My experience doing five years of quarterly reviews has verified that claim; it always makes the next quarter much more productive for me.
Cowork Didn’t Invent the Process — It Just Runs It
The Productivity Field Guide process has a fixed shape, and it is exactly the shape the Cowork workflow walks through. I took the digital template I used before and created a skill in Claude Cowork, using the skills I’d learned from The Robot Assistant Field Guide. The basic review process includes:
- Opening (looking back) prompts: biggest win, biggest lesson, best and worst use of time, and an open-ended “How am I doing?” check-in.
- A role-by-role audit.
- Forward-facing closing prompts.
- Deciding how to implement action items from the review.
What Cowork Reads So You Don’t Have To
Cowork collects info from multiple sources to give me a comprehensive overview of last quarter. It looks at:
- My journal entries for the last 90 days.
- My daily notes for the last 90 days.
- My calendar items for the last 90 days.
- My weekly and monthly reviews for the past quarter.
It also looks at my roles list, my Arete statements (ideal behavior statements for each role), and the previous quarterly review.
It evaluates the prior quarter action item scorecard: what was done, what’s still in progress, and what was stalled or never started.
It also provides me with an overview of my recurring themes during the last quarter, three to five patterns observed across the reviews and the journal. These include emotional, practical, and behavioral observations.
Walking Through a Session, One Role at a Time
First is a series of opening prompts (looking back questions). Before starting the roles audit, Cowork reminds me to rewrite my Arete statements from scratch if I haven’t done so already.
The roles audit looks in detail at each of my current roles, one by one. It gives me my current Arete statements for the role that I’m reviewing.
It presents me with a summary of what I’ve done in that role over the last quarter and then asks me a series of questions to evaluate that role. Finally, it asks me for action items that I intend to implement in the next quarter regarding that role.
Next come the closing prompts. At the end of those, Cowork automatically provides me with a list of all my action items for each role, based on my responses.
Five Benefits I Didn’t Expect
There are five benefits to using Cowork for a quarterly review, based on my experience:
1. Cowork collects comprehensive information for me, which results in a more thorough review.
2. Cowork presents me with the information I need when I need it.
It’s like having an assistant that hands you the right page at the right time.
Cowork handles the donkey work of drawing the information that I need from multiple sources. It gives me my Arete statements for a role before reviewing it, and a summary of my activity over the past quarter for that role.
At the end, when it’s time to think about how to implement the action items I’ve identified for each role, it gives me a comprehensive list, grouped by role.
Having easy access to relevant information makes my answers more accurate because I’m not just trying to remember or relying on impressions but working from comprehensive, accurate data.
3. It publishes a thorough summary of my quarterly review and places it in NotePlan.
I can easily access and refer to it at any time under the “quarterly” button in NotePlan’s left panel. Cowork takes care of all of the formatting grunt work for me.
4. Interacting with Cowork to work through my quarterly review is more fun than using the template on my own.
Maybe it’s because the donkey work has been taken away.
The interaction with Cowork beats the form. A static template asks its questions and sits there. Claude Cowork asks follow-ups that pull more out of me.
5. Cowork automates the assembly, but I firmly keep the human core of evaluation and decision-making.
Cowork gathers, organizes, and prompts, but the evaluation of each role, the brutal self-assessment, and the decision about what to do or stop doing are completely mine.
The Assistant Gathers, You Still Do the Thinking and Judging
That last point is the one I’d leave you with. Cowork didn’t make my quarterly review shorter so much as it moved my effort to where it belongs.
I no longer spend the first hour or two digging through ninety days of notes to reconstruct what actually happened; I spend it deciding what it means and what I’m going to do about it.
I’ll keep doing this. The combination of Cowork handling the record and me handling the judgment gave me the most useful quarterly review I’ve done in six years, and I don’t see myself going back to the template alone.
If you’ve been putting off your quarterly review because the setup feels like a chore, that’s exactly the part worth handing off. Try it once this quarter with whatever assistant you use, and see how much more you have left for the thinking that only you can do.
Note: I wrote this blog post myself using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images and text improvements.
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