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January 30, 2009

Best & Worst Practices of Weekly Review

Moving on to part four in my five-part series on the best and worst practices of GTD: Mastering Workflow. Next up is the glue, the elixir, the special sauce of GTD--the Weekly Review stage. David Allen calls the Weekly Review, in particular, the critical success factor. It's a key to stress-free productivity and it's probably one of the pieces of GTD's approach that people avoid the most, yet it can often reap the most benefits.

Bottom line, if you don't have a systematic and thorough approach to reviewing your work, you'll never break free from the busy trap of thinking you need to be thinking and worrying about your work all of the time.

On the flip slide, there is a magical quality to the Weekly Review in that it actually saves time, energy, focus and attention on what you need to be thinking about, by giving you a systematic and trusted approach for reviewing your personal and professional commitments, so you can trust that you are making the best choices about what to DO (part five of this series!).

Unfortunately, avoiding regular reviews (certainly even lightweight daily reviews and thorough weekly reviews) means your action reminder system gets out of date and starts leaking. How do you know that? Your brain starts taking back what it let go of because it doesn't trust you're on it and seeing it when you need to. You start waking up in the middle of the night with the gnawing sense of anxiety that something fell through the cracks. You start getting into the busy trap of doing work as it appears, rather than working from your pre-defined work, because you know it's not current anyway. Out of survival, your brain starts trying to do a review of your commitments ALL OF THE TIME, 24/7 because it doesn't trust you're going to do one. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Best Practices: Reflect on a complete, current, and consistent inventory of your commitments--on a regular basis! A weekly review ensures your projects, calendar, and next action lists are clean and current.

Worst Practices: Letting your system get so far out of date it dies, or feels like a major effort to bring it back to life. Telling yourself you don't have time to do a review. Setting up the Weekly Review as a recurring appointment on your Calendar, then not showing up to your own meeting (good way to erode trust in your commitments).

Tips & Tricks for Weekly Review:
Although I've talked mostly about the Weekly Review, you will likely have different types of reviews:
-On a daily basis, the two key parts of your system you probably need to review are your Calendar and Next Action lists.
-On a weekly basis, we recommend as thorough a review as you can of all of your projects and actions. If you want the official GTD Weekly Review checklist, go to pages 184-190 of the GTD Book.
-On a monthly basis, you're likely going to want to look at your 20,00 / Areas of Focus to make sure you're giving attention on to those areas.
- On a yearly basis, you're going to want to review any higher level goals, visions, strategies in your personal and professional life.

-Most people need about an hour for the Weekly Review, sometimes more, sometimes less. Depends on your work and what your past week has been like. Give yourself a time limit if you're afraid of how long it might take. Just get as far as you can.
-Do it in an uninterrupted space.
-Acknowledge yourself for doing. Rewards work!
-During the Weekly Review, resist the temptation to Do what you find, unless it takes less than two-minutes.
-Do at least one, if you've never done one before, to have a reference point for the experience to help get yourself motivated to do another one.
-Any day works, although Friday seems to be the most popular day for most people.

If you've been one of those people who has implemented most of the GTD approach, but haven't gotten the Weekly Review down as a regular habit yet, you're not alone. It's no wonder our Weekly Review set is one of our most popular coaching tools.

It takes effort, but the rewards on the other end are sweet. Don't rob yourself of the value of GTD by doing the work to Collect/Process/Organize, but never stepping back to review and reflect on where you've been and where you're going.

Posted by Kelly at 09:29 AM | Comments (3)

January 09, 2009

GTD & iPhone

More and more people have been asking me lately about GTD & the iPhone. Since I recently switched from Palm to iPhone (I wrote up a case study on that on GTD Connect), I thought it might be useful to share some direction and tips for those of you looking for a GTD solution with the iPhone (or iTouch.)

Because iPhone was not built with any Tasks functionality, it has forced and given developers an opportunity to fill that void. You need to find both an application that runs on the iPhone AND a corresponding app to sync it to on a PC or Mac.

Frankly, I was shocked at how few GTD-friendly Tasks solutions there are in the App store. And, if I may be blunt, some of them claiming to be a "GTD" App seem to have no clue as to the best practices of GTD and what makes (and doesn't make) a useful GTD list-manager. So here's my take on that, given my 15+ years of working with this methodology and loads of software tools to manage workflow:

* It allows lists to be sorted by context/category
* It allows due date, but does not force it
* It does not force priority codes (really folks, this is GTD 101)
* It does not force or only allow tasks to be sorted by which day your going to do it
* It provides a note field for additional details about the project or action
* It does not force everything to be listed and assigned to a project (where would "get haircut" fit? Your "Maintain my hair project"??)
* It's easily accessible and user-friendly for viewing, adding and editing lists

After testing a few of them, the best one for me, as a PC user, is KeyTasks, by Chapura. It's $10 per year and syncs to Outlook 2007. This is not an endorsement, just a suggestion for those of you on Outlook stumped about how to sync it. Check it out if it's of interest.

There are also a few decent web-based solutions available, if you have nearly ubiquitous web access, and there are a few that are designed for Mac users that seem to be popular. Since I have not personally used those and don't want to claim to be an expert on them, I am not going to list them out here, but would leave it to you to run them through my list of what makes a good GTD list manager. And if you have a good solution, that meets the criteria of my list above, feel free to post it here as a comment.

Posted by Kelly at 10:33 AM | Comments (68)

January 08, 2009

5 Ways to Get Better at GTD

Happy New Year! I hope this will be a wonderful new year for all of us. To kick off this year, I am sharing 5 ways to get better at GTD.

1. Don't use your mind as your reminder system. This is probably one of the hardest things for people to get and master with GTD. It's an essential best practice for stress-free productivity.

2. Empty your Inboxes on a regular basis. Yes, empty, process, decide down to zero on a regular basis. Why? It's easiest to maintain your work when you get to zero on a regular basis, than it is to leave anything in your Inboxes where your brain keeps trying to reprocess it and have attention on it.

3. Get all of your commitments into a trusted, seamless system that attracts you more than repels you. One hole in the boat can make it start to tip, and eventually sink.

4. Review your projects and actions regularly so you trust what's in there so you can make trusted choices about what to do.

5. Get REALLY good at clarifying the next action. This practice alone will transform workflow. Is the next action really the next physical, visible step you need to take? Do you have all of the information you need?

How are you doing with these? Do you see any improvement opportunities?

Posted by Kelly at 09:25 AM | Comments (8)