What does it mean that the commitment review?

Regularly review all active commitments to ensure they still deserve your resources.

Example: Every Sunday at 4 PM you sit down with a cup of coffee and open the same document. It lists every active commitment in your life — twenty-three items across six domains. You read each one aloud. For each, you ask three questions: Is this still within budget? Have any exit criteria been triggered? Would I re-enter this today knowing what I know now? The first time you did this, eighteen months ago, the review took ninety minutes and you released four commitments that had been quietly draining you for over a year. Now it takes forty minutes. Not because you rush it, but because your portfolio is cleaner — you carry fewer commitments, each one deliberately chosen. Three weeks ago the review surfaced something you had been ignoring: a professional obligation whose exit criterion had been met for two months. You had been rationalizing your way around it. The review, with its structured questions, made the rationalization visible. You began your exit process the next morning. Without the review, you would have carried that dead commitment for another six months, accumulating guilt and leaking cognitive resources the entire time.

Try this: Build and execute your first commitment review right now. Step one: create a single document listing every active commitment you are currently holding — professional, personal, creative, health, relational, financial, domestic. Include commitments you are keeping and commitments you are failing at. Step two: for each commitment, score it on three dimensions — budget fit (does this fit within my current capacity given everything else? 1-5), exit status (have any of my predefined exit criteria been met? yes/no/none set), and renewal standing (knowing what I know now, would I enter this commitment today? yes/partially/no). Step three: any commitment scoring below 3 on budget fit, triggering an exit criterion, or receiving a "no" on renewal gets flagged for immediate action — release, renegotiate, or defer. Step four: schedule your next review for exactly one week from today and put it on your calendar as a recurring event.