How do you review a portfolio of small products once a year?

Once a year, put every product on one page. Next to each, write its slot and how long it really took, one line on its year, and one word chosen from 4: keep, grow, hand over or close. It takes an evening, and it's the only time you ask whether the shape of the whole thing is right.

The first January

The first one took an evening in my eighth year, and it produced one change. It was the most useful evening of that year.

I'd been running products week to week for 7 years. Each had its slot and its weekly look, and I was reasonably good at noticing when something in a product changed. I'd never looked at all of them at once.

So I took one sheet of paper and wrote every living product down the left side. No charts, no targets. (I've seen enough of both.)

Next to the landlord tool I wrote that its Wednesday slot had taken under 40 minutes for months on end. Its word was keep. And I realised keeping it didn't need a slot every week. I moved it to every other Wednesday, and it's been there since. That freed half an evening a fortnight, which isn't much, until you remember the slot is the scarcest thing you have.

Why once a year

The weekly look is for the product: faults, email, the cost line. You don't ask whether a product should exist on a Sunday evening, because the question is too big and the answer rarely changes in a week. The January page is for the business, which is the set of products together and the week you live in.

The traps

• "Keep, maybe grow." That's 2 words. Choose one.
• Hard words written in January and not done by spring. Put the date next to them.
• A product kept to avoid admitting something. Ask: would I start this again tomorrow, knowing what I know?

The January page is the printable template I use.

The Second Product has the chapter.