« GTD & iPhone | Main | More on GTD & BlackBerry »

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reviews (certainly even lightweight daily reviews and thorough weekly reviews) means your action reminder system gets out of date and starts leaking.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Worst Practices: Letting your system get so far out of date it dies, or feels like a major effort to bring it back to life.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 January 30, 2009 09:29 AM

Comments

Excellent summary, Kelly, this helps me a lot...thank you!

Posted by: Joe Ely at January 30, 2009 01:36 PM

"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)."

This really struck today as a description of my own follow-through on the Weekly Review. It's a recurring appointment on my calendar because I know it should be, but I too frequently allow almost anything else to take priority over that 1.5 hours of mind-calming activity. And without realizing it, I have, indeed, been eroding trust in my commitments.

Thanks, Kelly, for the wake-up call.

Posted by: Dean at January 30, 2009 04:01 PM

So, from this post and from David's Productivity Letter I saw late Friday, I stopped what I was doing around 5:15pm Friday and did my first official Weekly Review in a long time. Pulled David's .pdf file from the site and walked through it.

Can't tell you how helpful it was.

The clarity I got was incredible. I got my next-action list cleaned up. Significantly, I got rid of the "clutter" on my desk which I had been telling myself was not clutter. I'm set for next week.

And had one of the most relaxing and pleasant weekends I've had in a long time.

I set a recurring appointment for myself at 1pm each Friday for the next three Fridays to continue to drive this to the level of a habit.

Thanks for the encouragement, Kelly. Do keep it up.

Posted by: Joe Ely at February 1, 2009 05:02 AM