Weekly review is both the pinnacle and downfall of practicing GTD. On the one hand, a really thorough review provides outstanding clarity, a deep sense of control, and a healthy surge of energy. The flip side is that doing a weekly review takes time and seems to meet with a great deal of resistance, even among those folks who are convinced that doing a weekly review is a good and necessary thing. There are a couple of obstacles that seem to be pretty common.
One obstacle to doing the weekly review is time. A super thorough, get squeaky clean weekly review is not done in five minutes. Potentially, reaching that GTD state of nirvana—mind like water—requires hours. When you don’t know how long something’s going to take, or you think it’s going to take some unspecified (but big) chunk of time, you’re going to naturally start to resist and procrastinate.
When you’re struggling to keep up with all the stuff coming at you, it’s hard to stop-and-sit still to accomplish the weekly review. This is a natural tendency that highly active people experience. We get wound up. And because we are often responding to urgency, it’s very difficult to release the sense of urgency and engage with the important. This often manifests as high distractability, even to the point of creating interruptions for yourself. One of the states that GTD is supposed to free us from is forgetting what we are going to do. But just try to sit still and review your stuff. The next thing you know, you’re suffering from these terrible urges to stop reviewing and rush off to DO something. And if you don’t tend to it right now, you’ll forget it, right?
As part of one of the podcasts I produce (@Context), I co-hosted an interview with a high performing, amazingly dynamic GTD-er: Rob Peters. Rob said something about weekly review that really got my attention, something that may hold the key to busting through both of these blocks to consistent weekly review. Rob uses a detailed checklist to know what to review. But that’s not the key. The key is being systematic. Instead of letting his attention get captured and derailed by something he runs across or thinks of during his review, Rob sticks to the checklist.
If you’re new to GTD, there are already some checklists available to give you a starting point. (Probably some of the best advice you can get is found at ZenHabits.) Personally, I strongly recommend setting a timer and ruthlessly limiting weekly review to an hour at most. The reason is that work expands to the time you allot to it—allot a lot, it’ll take a lot, so don’t go there.
With practice, you’ll get really good at knowing precisely what to review and how. As you learn, capture your knowledge into your trusted system, use your knowledge in the following week, and revise your checklist. After two or three weeks, you’ll have your own sleek, trusted weekly review system down to a fine art. And before you know it, you’ll be sailing through your days and weeks like the GTD ninja your were born to be.
This post was originally published at http://tararobinson.com.
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