The Weekly Focus Ritual
Post what you're focused on this week, and whether last week's focus actually landed.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Holley's most-used personal framework is a deliberately low-fi weekly loop: every Monday, in a shared team channel, each person writes what they are focused on this week and reflects on whether last week's focus actually got done. It is not a standup and not a task list — the unit is priorities, not tasks. The value compounds: over months, the written record surfaces patterns about your own estimation errors and the seasonal work you never plan for.
Origin
Tim Holley's own practice, run with his buyer-experience product team at Etsy.
Core principles
- 01Writing it down forces you to decide what actually matters.
- 02Publishing it to peers creates social proof and therefore accountability, at near-zero cost.
- 03The unit is priorities, not tasks — a blurry line, but anchoring high is what makes the exercise useful.
- 04The reflection half is the half people skip and the half that generates the learning.
- 05Kept consistently, the log reveals patterns invisible in any single week.
How to run it
- 1
Pick a shared channel and a fixed day
Use an existing team channel (Holley's team uses their buyer-experience product channel) and a fixed cadence — Mondays. Keep the format deliberately low-fi; no tool, no template ceremony.
Pro tip Low-fi is a feature. Every process improvement you add raises the cost of doing it and lowers the odds it survives the quarter.
- 2
Write this week's focus areas
Each person posts what they are focused on this week — a small number of priorities, not a task list. Force yourself to name what matters rather than what is scheduled.
Pro tip The priorities/tasks line is blurry. Err toward the level of abstraction where a colleague could tell whether the week succeeded.
- 3
Reflect on last week's focus honestly
In the same post, report on last week: was it done, is it still in progress, did it slip. The honest status is what makes the record useful later.
Watch out Skipping this half turns the ritual into a to-do list broadcast with no learning loop. The reflection is where the framework earns its keep.
- 4
Mine the log for personal patterns
After enough weeks, read back. Look for two patterns specifically: which types of focus area consistently take you longer than you budget, and which types of work reliably crop up at particular times of year so you can pre-book space for them.
Pro tip These two patterns are the entire ROI. Set a calendar reminder to re-read the log quarterly, or you will never do it.
In the wild
Every Monday in Etsy's buyer experience product channel, team members post what they are focused on and how last week panned out — done, still in progress, or otherwise. Holley describes it as a weekly, higher-level standup that anchors on priorities rather than tasks.
→ A very low-cost accountability mechanism that Holley cites as the framework he personally returns to most and finds really helpful in the day-to-day.
Kept consistently, the log surfaces patterns an individual week hides: 'those types of focus areas take me longer than I think, I should budget more time' and 'these are the type of things that crop up at this time of year, I might need to start making space for them.'
→ Better time budgeting and pre-planned capacity for recurring seasonal work — compounding value from a habit that costs minutes a week.
Common mistakes
Listing tasks instead of priorities
Holley acknowledges the line is blurry but insists on anchoring at the priority level. A task list broadcast produces no reflection and no pattern — just a public to-do list.
Dropping the look-back
Only posting forward-looking focus removes the accountability and the calibration data. The 'did last week's focus actually get done' half is what makes it a loop rather than an intention.
Doing it privately
The mechanism is social proof — articulating it out to others is what creates the accountability. A private journal entry has none of that force.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual contributors and managers who feel busy but cannot say whether the week advanced anything that mattered, and teams wanting accountability without meeting overhead.
Not ideal for
Purely reactive roles (on-call, incident response, support queues) where the week's work is genuinely dictated by inbound and pre-declared priorities are fiction.
From the transcript
“a simple exercise of weekly focus. What are you focused on this week? And then reflecting on did you get done the things you were…”
“just the exercise of thinking about what matters, writing it down and having a little bit of social proof or like articulating it out to…”
“in our in our buyer experience product channel, on Mondays we everyone's kind of sharing what they're focused on, how how last week panned out”
“Trying to think about the priorities and not tasks”
From the episode
Inside Etsy’s product, growth, and marketplace evolution
Tim Holley (VP of Product)