Start, Stop, Continue Exercise Example for Home Use

When it comes to managing our home and honey-do list, there are always things to change. Whether it is starting something new, stopping a bad habit, or making sure you can continue doing the things that are helping keep you and your household operating as smooth as possible. 

At the time we are writing this post, it is New Year’s Eve, and New Years’ resolutions may be on your mind. Wheather is a new year, a new quarter, or your honey-do list process needs modifying the Start, Stop, and Continue Excercise is a great place to start to generate new ideas, get on the same page as your partner, and create an action plan. 

Below we will explain how to conduct a Start, Stop, and Continue review. As you become familiar with it, you can easily add this to your weekly honey-do list review agenda items. That being said, we feel weekly is too much and recommend a monthly, Quarterly, or on a yearly Cadence. 

The Purpose of Start, Stop, and Continue Review

The purpose of the review is to generate a list of things that you need to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing to reach a desired outcome or goal you and your partner have decided. Once a list is generated, the exercise helps you prioritize what is most essential and to start taking action. 

5 Steps to having a successful Start, Stop, and Continue Review. 

• Brainstorm
• Organize
• Prioritize
• Decide
• Act

We will now go through each step so you can go through this exercise 

Brainstorm:  Depending on the person, you will generate too many ideas for each category, or this may be the hardest part. Regardless here is a Start, Stop, and Continue Trello Template you can use. Here is a brief description of each category.

Tips to Brainstorming:

You should try and list items that are actionable as much as possible, but if you put an outcome, that is okay. For example, Getting Fit as a couple is an outcome. Listing several actions like taking a fitness class together, stop watching too so much TV, and continue eating healthy maybe some examples of some activities you could add. 

We recommend starting with a single category and moving on to the next one. You may be working on Start and have an idea for Stop. You can quickly add it, but we recommend going right back to thinking about Start and continue brainstorming for that category. Bouncing back and forth between lists is okay, but should be avoided if possible. 

In teams we have worked with, adding a time limit to each category helps keep you focused and on task. 

Organize: At this time, review each category list together and remember you are not prioritizing yet, but grouping common themes. We recommend grouping by outcomes. If you already have a list of goals, resolutions, or honey-do projects, this is a great place to start. If not, this is a great time to think if I Start this. It will help me achieve X, Y, Z. If the item you have is an outcome, change it to something actionable.

Please don’t turn it into a SMART goal. If you are familiar with SMART goal setting, this could be tempting to do now, but we recommend doing this when you get to the Decide Step. If you have already done this subconsciously, it is okay. We don’t want you spending time crafting a goal that you may not decide is worth acting on yet. 

Remember not to eliminate any idea you have while organizing or prioritizing. If other thoughts come up, you can add them at this time, but once you finish, go right back to organizing.

Prioritize: Where you have organized everything by outcomes, this should be a matter of prioritizing what is most important to you and your partner. 

At this point in the exercise, it is down to preference. You can put all of your ideas into one list or leave them separate.  

Decide:  If you had an excellent brainstorming session, you probably have too many things and could start to feel overwhelmed. It is okay because you are not alone. Remember, you don’t need to do all of these things at once.

  In the decide step, you generally should start moving the items you plan on doing to your honey-do list. Before moving them over, you should turn them into SMART Goals and, if needed, create an action plan.

 You can get rid of the remaining ideas, but we recommend saving them so you can reference them in a future Start, Stopping, and Continue Session.  

Act: For many, this is the hardest part. If you have created a honey-do list and conduct a weekly review, you are in a good start and need to add the tasks to your honey-do list system. Between your idea being on your honey-do list and your weekly reviews, your new goal and action should be top of mind for you and your partner.

 Habits are hard to change, and we recommend if you have time reading “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. It might be worth taking the extra time going through his process of identifying and changing ques and rewards to help you hit our goal. 

The last part of acting is setting yourself accountable. If it is an individual goal, your partner will help keep you accountable during your weekly honey-do reviews. If you need some extra help, make sure to share your goal with a friend or post your goal in our Facebook group, where we and other couples can help hold you accountable.