GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit

At the very first of David Allen's recorded lecture, Getting Things Done Fast, he tells his audience that the nigh important just single almost hard part of becoming more productive is making fourth dimension every week for a weekly review. Well-nigh important considering this couple of hours of "time out" once a week is where virtually all the GTD magic happens – it'southward where nosotros make sure everything'due south out of our heads and in our trusted system, and so we tin use our brains for doing Skillful Stuff instead of nagging us about the Expert Stuff nosotros should exist doing. Almost hard because… well, I accept my theories.

Get-go of all, weekly reviews are hard because it is but difficult, in a applied sense, to accept an hr or ii off and focus on the bigger movie. This difficulty is compounded by psychological factors – for i affair, about of us feel our moment-to-moment involvement in our piece of work is essential, and if we're not actually working on work – even busy work – we fearfulness things will autumn autonomously. For another thing, spending a couple hours thinking about our work doesn't feel like work – information technology tin take some time to go into our heads that this "meta-work" is an important part of our piece of work as a whole.

At that place are emotional reasons also. For ane thing, I think about of u.s. are just agape, on some level, of spending that much time with ourselves. What kind of stuff are we going to detect out? Self-reflection tin be scary! Also, most of us have been raised to come across such self-reflection as kind of selfish – who are nosotros to deserve that kind of scrutiny? That leads the states non to trust ourselves, which leads to a lack of honesty that undermines the weekly review habit – you can't build a trusted system without trusting yourself!

For me, at that place has e'er been some combination of these factors. My schedule is kind of chaotic – not but because of disorganization but considering as an bookish role of my job is to reply to whatever my 150 students in any given semester throw at me, and to do so fairly apace. In my other life every bit a writer, while I tin can block out fourth dimension to work, I am somewhat at the whim of editors, clients, and of course my audiences – who knows what emergency next week will bring?

All that chaos has made it difficult for me to engage myself in a weekly review consistently – every effort has lasted a few weeks then fallen to the wayside as the residuum of my life piled up (a sign, maybe, that I wasn't doing it very well anyway). On top of that, also much of what I practice in weekly reviews gets waylaid subsequently as I put my plans into practice, which has made it harder and harder to trust myself, which once again is bad for my trusted organisation.

A return to trust

I know all this, so when I started the procedure of recommitting myself to building a system equally close as possible to GTD, I knew I'd have to deal with it.

Fortunately, I have a few things working in my favor, and I retrieve I've done a couple things correct in laying the groundwork this fourth dimension around.

While I haven't always been very good well-nigh the weekly review, I take mostly been skillful about keeping my lists upwards-to-date, and nearly doing "mini-reviews" – scrolling through my list of projects every few days to encounter if there's anything I could be adding as adjacent actions. This is one of the core practices that makes upwards the weekly review, and so I've got that function down, and can build on it.

What makes me more hopeful this time around is that I've added a list of Areas of Focus to my setup, the idea being that non merely do I generate tasks from my list of projects, but I generate projects and tasks from my Areas of Focus list. This should help me keep on track, since a) it's something I don't do in my "mini-reviews", and b) it leads into the "looking forrad" function of the weekly review, which is the part that I think scares me (and others) off.

That leaves, of course, the practical concern of scheduling the fourth dimension in. Fridays are a natural for me, since I rarely work on Fridays – but although I've been doing Friday weekly reviews for the last couple weeks, I'm thinking Mondays might be better, since they put me "closer to the action" – I have a amend idea of what's going on around me at the starting time of the week than I do guessing what might be going on at the terminate of the previous calendar week.

Getting weekly reviews done

As I said at the beginning of this mail, weekly reviews are important – rather than existence a drain on your available work time, done right the weekly review should add together not only to your piece of work time but your conviction and calmness virtually doing that work. For a sense of what a weekly review should look like, accept a expect at my Dorsum to Basics post from last twelvemonth.

More than anything else, though, a weekly review is a point of connection betwixt you and your piece of work. We live in a go-go-go society where work – whatever piece of work – is expected of each of united states of america, all the time. Americans, especially, work harder than simply about anyone – not necessarily more efficiently or on more important things, but longer hours and with fewer breaks. It's all besides piece of cake in all this rush of work for work'due south sake to lose track of why we're doing information technology and of what it has to do with us every bit people.

A weekly review is near task direction and scheduling, merely it'southward also about reconnecting with our work in a personal style, evaluating our work in terms of college-purpose goals and life objectives, aligning the work we do today with the dreams we have of tomorrow. We aren't afforded many moments like that in life, and so it's important that we create them for ourselves.

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/gtd-refresh-part-5-building-the-weekly-review-habit.html

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