Three review altitudes

When This Fires

• When establishing a maintenance protocol for a workflow system
• When workflows degrade without anyone noticing until they fail catastrophically
• When you have many workflows and need a structured way to keep them healthy
• Complements Retire workflows inactive for 60+ days… (retirement threshold) with the review cadence that identifies candidates for retirement

Common Failure Mode

Single-cadence review: doing only monthly reviews (common) means execution problems persist for up to 4 weeks before detection, and strategic misalignment persists for months because monthly reviews don't naturally prompt strategic questioning.

The Protocol

(1) Weekly (5 minutes): For each active workflow, ask: "Was this executed this week? If yes, were there any issues? If no, was it supposed to be?" Flag non-executing workflows for investigation. (2) Monthly (15 minutes): Review the full portfolio: "Which workflows are active? Which are stale? Are there gaps — things I do repeatedly without a documented workflow? Are there redundancies — multiple workflows covering the same function?" (3) Quarterly (30 minutes): Strategic alignment: "Do my workflows still serve my current goals? Has my context changed (new role, new tools, new priorities) in ways that require workflow revision? Are there new capabilities (AI tools, automation options) that could transform existing workflows?" (4) Each altitude produces different actions: weekly produces execution fixes, monthly produces portfolio adjustments, quarterly produces strategic rewrites. (5) Schedule these reviews as recurring calendar events — review systems only work if the reviews actually happen.