April 30, 2008

Taking some time to orient our new Dolan to this world

This is one of Maxwell's first photo-shoots. Spittin' image of me isn't he!? I'll be taking off a couple of months from blogging to take care of Maxwell.

Here's a bit that I wrote in the dizziness of the early hours of my wife's labor (and forgot to publish at the time):

Talk about open loops. The past few hours, as we work through these early contractions and watch them get more regular and frequent, has been like an open loop fest. Any uncollected (and many previously unconscious) things I've had my attention on have been bubbling up like bubbles in a champaign glass. Noticing my own psyche spin with excitement and wonder and nervousness as I cycle through my own anticipation and support AnneLise through her own journey and Max's transition to this world.

Can't wait to hold him in my hands.

Michael

Posted by mdolan at 09:14 PM | Comments (6)

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 05:57 PM | Comments (2)