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January 31, 2008
Become More Attracted to Your Weekly Review
For those of you who haven't seen David Allen live and in-person, I highly recommend checking him out in action at one of his wonderful GTD The RoadMap seminars. Here's the current schedule.
In GTD The RoadMap, David does a masterful job of elucidating the power and ease that becomes available when one has both perspective on and control over all of one's commitments. All control and no perspective? You're stuck in the realm of the Micro-Manager. All Perspective and no control? You're a Crazy-Maker with grandios visions and no grip on how to really make them happen.
In GTD The RoadMap, David also shares some great perspective on how to get your own practice of GTD to "stick." His main point here is that in order to see how to implement and maintain GTD and feel compelled enough to stick with it, you must identify enough with the resulting experience that you can't help making it happen and keeping it going.
That got me thinking. How can we take that wisdom and apply it in a real, actionable way to improving our own hit-rate on doing our weekly review, the essential and often neglected practice of GTD?
How better to identify with the resulting experience of a weekly review than to actually do one and then immediately turn your attention to carefully observing your own specific experience of having just completed it. What I mean by this is to literally spend a few minutes checking in with yourself and answering the following questions:
- How do I feel about myself and my work now that I've completed this weekly review?
- How does my body feel now that all of my commitments are updated and current? Am I tired? Awake? Calm? Invigorated?
- What is now possible that may not have been possible before I completed this weekly review?
You might even write your observations down over the the course of several weekly reviews and then look back to see what patterns you find. I believe that doing this self-observation over the course of several months will improve your consistency in actually doing and completing weekly reviews. It's a simple, quick exercise to engage yourself in fully identifying with one of the core practices of GTD.
Some other ideas I've seen work wonders for instilling and supporting the weekly review habit include:
- Invite the support of your friends and colleagues to do your weekly reviews together. We've seen this work well at several of our client companies, and we even do it in our own company.
- If your schedule is always changing or you travel a lot, making a repeating calendar appointment a lost cause, include as part of each weekly review a step in which you plot out and commit to the dates and times for your next two or three weekly reviews.
- If distractions are difficult to overcome, temporarily move your weekly review to a private space or conference room where you can be undisturbed.
What about you? What has worked for you regarding strengthening the muscle of the weekly review habit?
Posted by mdolan at January 31, 2008 05:57 PM
Comments
An important part of the weekly review is actually reviewing accomplishments. This gives you motivation, it allows you to see what works and what didn't and most importantly gives you the opportunity to determine what items are worth it to automate or eliminate for the future.
Posted by: Summy at January 31, 2008 08:37 PM
Michael,
Thank you for this refreshing review of the importance of Weekly Reviews; most importantly in how we feel as a result of them.
Personally, I have a love/hate relationship with my Weekly Review. I feel surge of creative energy and calmness when I complete my review, yet I still have resistance to it.
I made the mistake early on of making my Weekly Review a "full" review of everything and anything. To fully complete the review took me well over three hours and I found myself a bit exhausted despite the cleaning and clearing of my head. As such, I began to resist it during future scheduled review times.
To combat this, I got rid of all the items I had put on my list to review and created an "Essential Weekly Review Checklist" which includes the following areas:
* Collect Everything into In
* Get In to Zero (in-basket, voicemail, email, computer filing system)
* Review Calendar Data (previous & upcoming)
* Review Waiting-For list
* Review Someday/Maybe MindMap (in MindManager)
* Review 10,000 ft. Master Projects List (in MindManager)
* Review Action Lists in Hipster (my capture and NA tool)
* Review Read/Review items/buckets
* Input updated MindMaps into GTD Binder (I carry my altitude maps with me in my brief case wherever I go)
Come Friday after lunch, I get a fresh cup of water, close the door to my office, put on some fun music, and start working from the top down. They are in order of importance, so if I don't get to the items at the bottom, then I am OK with that. I just mark on my master checklist the last time I completed this section, which alerts me to spend time on it in the future.
Through decluttering my review down to the basics and making sure not to use my review as the time to empty my email and voicemail (try to get those to zero at the end of each day), I have been able to rock the review and reap its rewards in my GTD system!
Posted by: Brian J. Elizardi at February 1, 2008 09:08 AM
