Tools for Thought

The title says it all. LifeDev has graciously posted my guest article here. It deals with explicitly looking for the presuppositions that frame how we view a problem or project. It also contains a few examples for you to run through as a lateral thinking training exercise.

In a reply to my Pattern Language entry on General Reference Files, David Goodger recently commented:

I have never understood the rule to use hangerless file folders. I don’t see how using Pendaflex adds any overhead. The rule seems completely arbitrary, and Allen’s GTD book doesn’t back it up with any arguments or evidence.

Do you agree with the rule, and could you expand on the reasoning behind it?

My logorrheic reply was becoming a de facto post, so I’ve made it an actual post.

I use hanging folders for my tickler file. It’s easier to keep a mere 43 folders upright with Pendaflex than with a follower block, and the even weight distribution makes them easier to bring forward each day.

I started my reference filing system by using Pendaflex. I didn’t realize that my file cabinet had a follower, so Pendaflex was a no-brainer. Over time, however, I noticed that my willingness to file things immediately began to drag. I didn’t like having to assemble the folder, the hanger and the label tab — not to mention labelling the tab insert. So I chucked the tabs, made a preassembled stock of folder/hanger pairs that I kept in the back of the file cabinet, and labelled directly on the folder.

One problem I had with doing this was that the label on the folder tab would only extend halfway above the hanger, making it difficult to read. I also found myself irritated with having to extract the folder from the hanger, since the folder is all I wanted on my desk, and reinsert it when finished.

I was inclined to dump the hangers at that point, but in my experience, any ad-hoc backstops like bookends or magnetic followers inevitably lead to flaccid files unless my file cabinet was filled to the brim. Pendaflex was the lesser evil.

I should point out that I only had a single two-drawer file cabinet, with one drawer allocated as a tickler file and the other for general reference. My workstation’s location made it physically impossible to add another file cabinet. In that context, a folder enclosed in a hanger is wasted space — you might be able to get two or even three naked folders in the same space, depending on their contents.

Then one day I discovered that my file cabinet actually did have a follower in the back. I ditched the hangers and have just used naked folders since. While I still think that Pendaflex hangers are more aesthetic and give better weight distribution, it’s easier for me to retrieve and file things rapidly if I only have to deal with the folder.

The only other component to deal with is the labeler when the file is created. The typical use case for files is a one-to-many ratio for creation-to-retrieval, so the overhead of using a labeler is worth it.

The bottom line for me is that David Allen does, in fact, advocate the hangerless folder tip too strenuously, but I still think it’s the more convenient route unless you:

• Have plenty of space in your file cabinet
• Keep a stock of empty, preassembled folder/hanger pairs close at hand
• Prevent your labels from being obscured or engulfed by the hangers
• Have a file cabinet with no follower block

If you preassemble folders and hanger, you might actually want to keep the plastic tabs and add those onto the hangers. Then when its time to make a file, apply the label to the surface of the plastic tab itself instead of the insert. It doesn’t look as good, but it does save a little extra fiddling.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to idea generation and problem solving is familiarity with our own thought process. A problem, once recognized, evokes a chain of associations drawn from memory, and the strong tendency is to apply a stock solution that worked in the past for a similar situation. The existing ideas or solutions may or may not be sufficient, but in any case we want something more original.

Many people have noticed that after grappling with a problem, a change of context is often all that’s required to evoke new insights: sleep on a problem, take a walk, take a shower. These “brain breaks” can be effective, but the results are haphazard, and the process is inefficient. There must be a more conscious way to disrupt the flow of thought from its usual pathways

Random Stimulation

When a computer program needs to generate a random number, it actually generates a pseudorandom number based on a mathematical formula — computers, after all, aren’t very random by nature. The randomness of the pseudorandom number is increased by modifying or “seeding” it with an externally derived number, like that day’s calendar date.

The human brain can benefit from a similar procedure: taking some external input to disrupt and modify its established thinking patterns. One of the most systematic methods of random stimulation, drawn from the advertising industry, is the random word technique.

The classical implementation of the random word technique is to pose your problem, then open up a book to a random page, and pick the first word on the fifth line down. The word position is arbitrary (it could just as easily be the fourth word on a first line), but the rule helps guard against selection for relevance. The object is to pick a word precisely because it’s not relevant to the problem, forcing the mind to approach the problem from a new angle.

An Example

The owner of a hamburger stand gets a call from one of his three employees. He’s quitting with no advance notice, and there’s no one to cover his shift until a replacement is found. To help the owner solve this problem, I decide to toggle from this document and choose the first noun that appears in the fourth paragraph of a Wikipedia entry I have open. The magic word is “gardens.” Thinking out loud:

• Gardens grow . . . Offer overtime to the remaining two employees to extend (grow) their shifts, minimizing the hours the owner has to cover
• Gardens . . . Plants . . . Plants need pruning . . . Cut (prune) the hours of operation to the most profitable times
• Gardens are beautiful . . . Close for remodeling (beautifying) as a pretext while hiring in the interim
• Gardens . . . Plants . . . Transplant . . . Contact neighboring food establishments to see if staff can be spared (transplanted) in exchange for another resource or favor

Granted, none of the ideas here are sensational, but I should point out that this example is an exercise I just came up with while writing this post. I didn’t pick an existing “best case” to make the exposition more persuasive.

Getting Started

Using random words is difficult at first. It’s extremely tempting to abandon the effort and pick a “better” word. The temptation should be resolutely resisted. Cherry picking randomly generated words is tantamount to choosing the word in the first place. The criterion for choosing will always be relevance, and the provocative effect is lost — there’s no broadening of context.

One allowable modification of the “no selection” rule is to use nouns instead of verbs and adjectives. Nouns tend to have richer networks of associations and are easier to work with. For instance, you might use the magazine in front of you to select a random word, and decide before opening it that you’re going to pick the first noun in the last paragraph.

When training yourself to use random words, use a timer to ensure the you spend sufficient time with each problem-word pair. Set the timer for two to five minutes for each pair, and keep generating associations until the timer goes off. Don’t stop if you get a brilliant idea; keep going until the end of the allocated time. The brilliant idea will still be there (you can and should write it down), but spending the extra time might lead to an even more brilliant one, and for training purposes, the process matters more than the content you generate.

For any task management system to be trustworthy, it has to be realistic. It needs to have as few placeholders as possible, but no fewer. It needs to hold as many projects and actions as we’re genuinely committed to, but no more.

The discipline of rapidly capturing new inputs and processing them into a list or calendar needs to be matched with an equally important discipline: the ability to review and reevaluate whether or not a to-do is worth doing. We need to be willing and able to take things off a list as rapidly as we put them on.

Reviewing projects and actions contains a paradox. To give reviews the full attention they need to get everything off of our minds, we need to be willing to step into the eye of the storm and escape the busy trap. That means sacrificing time that might otherwise be spend doing some of the things we’re reviewing. But it also means that while we’re “idle,” everything seems doable, and it becomes easy to confuse overpopulating an action list with “total capture.”

For most of us, a list of 35 things to do at a computer is not realistic — not in the sense that they can’t be done, but in the sense that it’s unlikely that the entire list will be scanned with full attention. Having an action list with more items than we can practically review defeats the purpose of making it in the first place. If we gloss over half the list every time we look at it, then we’re implicitly keeping half the list in our heads, even if it’s on paper.

An action list should hold commitments, not shoulds. If the list heading indicates that the items on it should be done, but the list contains items that we realistically know won’t be done, we experience cognitive dissonance. We not only become less responsive to those particular items on list, but the integrity of the entire list is nullified, and we grow numb to the list as a whole. At that point, the list is no longer a functional tool, but simply extra work, which is why people become cynical about lists.

The obvious way to reconcile the dissonance is to follow through on actually doing what we’ve written down. There’s no need to labor the point. But sometimes the best way to manage a list is to do what’s on it.

Another way of following through on our commitments is to cancel the commitments that won’t realistically be fulfilled. Only experience and intuition can effectively discern whether or not a commitment is realistic. Managing agreements necessarily requires a level of personal judgment that can’t be systematized, however much productivity geeks would prefer otherwise.

The other option is to put should-be-done and could-be-done items in an appropriately labelled category. In GTD this list is called Someday/Maybe, but whatever it’s called, the point is to put de facto uncommitted actions in a category that matches how the mind actually relates to them rather than how it’s supposed to.

A next actions list is not a capture tool. With some tasks, it’s obvious that they need to get done, so putting those on an action list is more efficient than capturing them on a notepad first. But others require more reflection.

Separating the capturing and organizing phases of task management allows space for more contemplative processing. We can jot a note, throw it in our in-basket, then process it at an appropriate time — which may or may not be at the moment the note was taken. Having a buffer between capturing and organizing (i.e. listing, scheduling, filing) gives us the opportunity to think about whether or not something is worth doing.

Finally, having the habit of regularly reviewing all action lists gives us another opportunity to prune our lists. Just because something seemed like a good idea at the time we put it on a list doesn’t mean it will seem like it’s worth doing 24 hours later — or even an hour later. Review your lists and calendar once a day — before or after processing your email, voice mail and intray — and eliminate or defer any items that don’t mesh with your current reality.

Before we can manage our options, we need to have options. By default, the brain organizes learned experience into stable perceptual frameworks and common response patterns. It needs to do this. We wouldn’t want to consider every possible way of crossing the street; we just look both ways and walk if we see no coming vehicles. When encountering new situations, we usually draw on experience for efficiency’s sake. We do what works: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But sometimes we need to approach a problem or a project in a new way, even at the expense of efficiency. Instead of pursuing the first idea that occurs to us, we need to open up our menu of options.

To brainstorm on a problem, capture the obvious solutions first, then allocate a period of time to think of as many alternative solutions as possible without judging them. Then reexamine all solutions.

A good time period to start with is three minutes. Within the three minutes, continue to generate alternatives, even if — especially if — you come up with a good solution well before the time period ends. Use all of the time you’ve allocated. You can pick shorter periods or longer periods. But shorter periods tend not to be long enough to think of many new approaches. Longer periods, like 30 minutes, will tend to yield mostly minor variations on few fundamentally different approaches.

An Example

Someone want to cancel his cell phone account due to poor coverage and poor customer service, but he’s still under contract and would have to pay an early termination fee. The obvious options would be:

• Cancel and pay the fee
• Wait for the contract to expire

Then he lists some alternatives, without worrying about whether or not they’re usable. They may not be usable in the form they’re first expressed, but might be with some modification. In any case, he forges ahead:

• Demand unlimited roaming, threatening to cancel if not honored
• Downgrade to the carrier’s cheapest plan, porting his main number to a new carrier
• See if the charges can be expensed by his company for the remainder of the contract, using a new phone and carrier for personal calls
• Call CS and answer “no” when asked if he’s satisfied with his service

None of these are particularly sound alternatives, but they may lead to a creative accommodation. Let’s look at the second example: downgrading. He might currently be paying $60 a month on his current plan. He finds that he can get a bare bones plan (100 minutes per month, no text messing, etc.) for $20. Doing some research, he discovers that another carrier is offering a plan for $40 a month that’s nearly identical to the $60 plan he signed up for 10 months ago. So he adds the second carrier, using their line for his primary phone (with or without number portability), then dumps the unwanted carrier when the contract expires. He might even be able to combine that alternative with the third one — getting one of the lines expensed by his company.

In the fourth example, he can either make a call to customer service on some routine pretext, or use the first option, demanding unlimited roaming. At the end of the call, when he’s asked if he’s satisfied with his service, he tells the representive that he’s not. In many cases, negative feedback gets escalated, and someone in management calls back the customer to see if there’s some way to improve the situation.

He may end up opting for the obvious approaches, but by brainstorming he now has three times as many options as before, none of which are exclusive. Any of these approaches can be further examined for improvement opportunities: What would it take to make this solution work?

Brainstorming for Problems

Sometimes the difficulty in solving a problem lies in how we’ve defined “the” problem. Framing a problem a certain way frames the array of potential solutions. Someone wants to reduce her fast food consumption. Alternative problem definitions might be:

• Finding more time to cook at home
• Finding meals that are quick to prepare
• Becoming more proficient at cooking
• Ordering fast food in smaller sizes and quantities
• Transitioning to a diet low in sodium, fat, carbohydrates, etc.
• Minimizing or avoiding exposure to fast food venues

She expands way she defines the problem first, creating alternative problems, then takes each or any one or these and brainstorms alternative solutions.

Just because we think of a problem or solution in a certain way first doesn’t make it the best way. By generating alternatives, we create a broader context for deciding the best course of action. If the first, obvious approach turns out to be the best one, we’ve lost nothing by thinking beyond it.

Free Association

In addition to generating alternatives, we may need to simply capture aspects of a problem to make sure that our attention has covered a sufficiently broad scope. Several diagramming options like mind maps are applicable, but in many cases all that’s required is a simple checklist. Applying checklists to the fast food example:

• saving money
• eating less
• cooking
• health
• meal times
• exercise
• menu options
• convenience
• appetite
• habit

And so on. Any of these considerations can be expanded into its own checklist. An outliner, like OmniOutliner or Microsoft Word’s Outline View, provides a good structure for nested checklists: lists can be expanded, collapsed and reordered. As with brainstorming, define a time interval to generate considerations, and keep free associating until you reach the end of that period.

This week I’ll be finishing up the Pattern Language for Productivity series, making some non-trivial edits to it, and turning it into a PDF for download. I’ll leave the series on the blog as-is — I wouldn’t want to edit it retroactively — so you’ll definitely want to take a look at the e-book version, which will essentially be a “second edition.”

I’ll keep writing about productivity, but it’s always been my intention for the blog to move beyond cranking more widgets, so expect to see more diversity this month. In that spirit, let’s see what else was going on out there this week.

Alltop’s Lifehacks page. Tools for Thought has been selected for inclusion into Guy Kawasaki’s new blog aggregator. Alltop consists of single pages for the top blog categories, and each page has links to the top 40 blogs in each respective category, with links to each blog’s last four posts. The pages are updated ever 10 minutes, so it’s a great way to stay current without collecting feeds. It’s also great for discovering similar blogs. (Alltop)

Cuckoo, cuckoo. Nicholas Carr’s hilarious lancing of the Gaia-like “global consciousness” meme that’s been a staple of internet discourse since the open-sourcing the World Wide Web 15 years ago. “Define consciousness downward sufficiently and — cuckoo! — a global one emerges.” (Rough Type)

70 Simple Power Tao Secret Hacks to Writing the Perfect Productivity Article, Plus a Guide & System for Doing It. Clay Collins must channeling Terry Southern. This article is even funnier than Carr’s. The hacks are all here: write numbered lists (or “Don’t use transitions”), quote an eastern mystic, add a serene picture. And to think that I’d almost forgiven myself for writing a list article: Six Critical Information Resources for Your Cell Phone. (The Growing Life)

Three Ways to Mitigate Attention Crash, Yet Still Feel Informed. This looks like a losing battle to me: the attempt to fill every interstice of idle time with more information. Before pursuing the attempt to feel informed, it’s important to ask, “At what point will I feel informed?” What is enough information? Is it healthy to look at all windows of time in terms of their perceived lost opportunity cost? Definitely worth further consideration. (Micropersuasion)

Why Your Mental RAM Can Cut It. An interpretation of a passage in my Pattern Language entry on the Weekly Review. My use of “mental RAM” was a little more metaphorical than how it was portrayed (positively) here, but I’m enough of a geek to enjoy having a “four-bit brain.” (Team Taskmaster)

Our priorities are based on our time frames. When we eat an ice cream, we’ve made short-term enjoyment a priority over long-term health and vitality. When we postpone dinner with family and stay late at the office to complete a project, we’re making another priority choice. These may or may not be the right priorities, depending on their context and personal values. To keep our priorities congruent with our values, at helps to categorize them by levels of focus.

To clarify the impact and implications of your actions and projects, review them against your horizons of focus.

Horizontal and Vertical Focus

From moment to moment, we make choices of what to do and what not to do. The total impact of our lives is the sum of these choices. Each completed action satisfies some need in a broader context. Mundane tasks, like shopping, satisfy subsistence needs, contributing to your overall health. Researching a car purchase has implications for the image you project, and the transportation necessary to support yourself and your family. When we write down, think about or review discrete actions like grocery shopping or reading “Consumer Reports,” we are employing horizontal focus.

Horizontal focus refers to anything on the level of actions: errands, reading, phone calls, face-to-face conversations, purchases, drafts, email and so on. We need horizontal focus — it’s the level of practicality that turns visionary aspirations into visible pathmarks. We need the single step that gets the thousand mile journey out of our heads and onto the earth.

Horizontal focus is necessary but not sufficient. Particularly in the wage earning service sector, routine often prevents workers from looking beyond an immediate task, and they wind up spinning their wheels, being busy without being productive in a purposeful sense. Even many professional workers have trouble escaping the busy trap. A single action, like writing an email, consumes more time and attention than the overall value it adds in the scheme of things.

Vertical focus is the scheme of things. Here we add perspective to our action choices. In GTD, we look vertically at five horizons of focus, using altitude metaphors:

1. Runway: Next Actions — the immediate tasks we need to track to move a project forward
2. 10,000 feet: Projects — any outcome that takes more than one action step to accomplish
3. 20,000 feet: Areas of Focus — the aspects of our lives that need to be reviewed for balance
4. 30,000 feet: Short-Term Goals — outcomes that we intend to accomplish within 1 to 2 years
5. 40,000 feet: Lifestyle Goals — the long-term vision (5 years and beyond) of our ideal lifestyle
6. 50,000 feet: Life Purpose — the impact we would like to have on the world

If it’s not obvious, the specific timelines of the time-based horizons are somewhat arbitrary. We can think of a three-year goal as 30,000 feet, and it’s possible to realize at least some aspects of our ideal lifestyle in less than 5 years. Some people will quibble about the scope of “projects” encompassing everything from getting a round of venture capital to buying a sofa. Some people organize their life planning into quarterly goals. Use the time frames that make sense to you, in the language that make sense to you.

Runway and 10,000-foot levels have been discussed previously as Outcome and Action. Notice that two of the horizons in the list above are not part of a timeline. For the 20,000-foot level, areas of focus (not to be confused with horizons of focus), we list and examine the categories of our lives that matter to use. For instance:

• Marriage and family
• Finance
• Health and fitness
• Friendships
• Career goals
• Fun and recreation
• Creative expression
• Politics and community

These focus areas will vary from person to person — some people aren’t involved in politics and community, for instance — so it’s important to choose the values that truly matter to you personally; don’t just inherit someone else’s platitudes.

The value in constructing the focus areas list is that you can use it to make sure that you have at least something on your project list that represents fulfillment in each of these areas. You can use it during the weekly review to ensure that your project list is reasonably well balanced. You don’t want to fill your idle time with work just because you didn’t take fun seriously enough to incorporate it into your system. Look at each area and ask yourself if there are any projects, process projects or someday/maybes that still need to be captured.

The 50,000-foot level, raises an existential question, “What is my purpose here on the planet?”, that some people can answer with enviable clarity. For most of us, it’s a question we have to revisit periodically, answering it with intuition that grows more articulate over time through engagement and experience.

If necessary, reframe the question in a way you may find more answerable: “What impact would I like to have on the world?”, “What value do I have to offer?”, “What would be the most fulfilling expression of my life energy?”, “What is the legacy I would like to leave?”, and so on. When in doubt, think of the most reasonable, honest answer you can, even if you sense that it’s incomplete on some level, and put that down as your working 50,000-foot purpose; then examine it against your other horizons of focus and see they’re in accord, adjusting if necessary.

Many activities can be batched, not just repetitive ones. We have context lists that group like activities by the location or resource required — an @Computer list for tasks requiring a computer, an @Home list for tasks that can only be done at home, and so on. We can batch the processing of paperwork and email into discrete sessions of minimal frequency — twice per workday, for instance.

We can also batch our discussions with individuals. Instead of walking over to a coworker’s desk every time we come across an issue that needs to be discussed, we can take a moment to evaluate the urgency of the matter, and in the likely event that it’s actually not an emergency, batch it in a running track of issues that accumulate during the day.

Create a list called Agendas, with the names of everyone with whom you need to discuss non-emergency issues, then list the topics within each of those entries

Agendas is another list among the others to track in your system: Next Actions (Context Lists), Projects, Waiting For and Someday/Maybe. While the latter ones are flat lists, the Agendas list is nested. In an electronic organizer, each person’s name is a line item in Agendas, and each line item has a note attachment, within which the issues are added.

If you maintain a list with only a few people, an alternative to a nested list is simply having a separate flat list for each individual — @John, @Susan, etc. — then make each issue a line item. This is a good way to manage agendas if you’re using a paper-based system. Depending on the nature of your work, it may be a better idea to use an Agendas folder instead of just a list. This allows you to have any support documents relevant to the conversations right at hand.

Potential Problems

Beware. When batching several topics into one conversation, the other person — not accustomed to consolidated discussions — may dislike the perceived additional time it takes. Despite the obvious fact that interrupting someone 12 times a day takes more time than handling 12 topics in one sitting, many people are so used to asking and answering question at a time that an agendas list will seem like a burden.

Just because you have all topics in one list doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to cross everything off the list in a single discussion. There’s a point of diminishing returns where efficiency and effectiveness diverge. You may only get to work off a few topics at a time before the other person has to return or move on to some other task. Pick the highest priority items on the list that you can fit in his or her window of time, and do the best you can.

In some cases, all you have to do is point out the advantage of handling everything at once: “I could see that you were busy, and I didn’t want to keep interrupting you, so I decided to these things until we both had time to talk.”

Finally, reevaluate your list, and see if there aren’t some items where another communication channel might be better suited, like IM, email, Twitter or a wiki — especially for status updates. The less interaction you need, the better the chances are that using these media would be a less time consuming and disruptive way to keep people in the loop.

A complete review of projects and next actions held once per week is critical for keeping your tasks management system trustworthy, preventing “stuff” (unprocessed agreements, intentions, information) from piling up in mind to the point of distraction. Weekly reviews can be empowering, but they can be too empowering. From the repose of the weekly review, everything looks doable, and it’s tempting to commit to more than what’s realistic.

The object of the weekly review is to batch our thinking about everything we have to do during the week into a single session. Then during the week, we work off of the calendar and action lists that hold the results of that thinking. If the calendar and lists go unreviewed during the week, the purpose of having them is defeated. Not only do we need to remind ourselves of what to do each day; we also need to reevaluate what not to do, and remove, defer or delegate it.

To keep your system current, schedule a Daily Review, in which you:

1. Process your intray, email inbox and voice mail
2. Do a mind sweep
3. Review your calendar
4. Review your action lists

The last three shouldn’t take long — 10 or 15 minutes at the most. The most time consuming component of the weekly review, reviewing the project list (aside from adding new projects), is not necessary here. Processing will take the most time, commonly an hour to 90 minutes.

Does anyone have that much time? Think of it this way: you can handle the load piecemeal throughout the day, regrouping each time you chip away at your inbox, or you can batch process the bulk of your new inputs into a single session. Keep in mind that what’s being processed is work, not something in addition to it. It doesn’t go away just because it’s not processed.

If processing is the your first order of business each morning, you have the security and serenity of knowing that your inbox doesn’t have any time bombs lurking in middle of the stack. And when new inputs arrive during the day, it’s much easier to process them in real time if desired, because they’re not part of a mass of unexamined priorities.

What about the oft-repeated advice not to check email in the morning? Here we’re not “checking” email; we’re processing it, responding immediately to under-two-minute messages, deleting or filing irrelevant or inactionable ones, and moving actionable ones to an @Action or Follow-Up folder — extracting any projects or next actions.

By methodically processing email instead of haphazardly checking it, we get if off of our minds and into the system. When it’s time to start working, we’re not preoccupied with our inbox because we’ve made decisions on everything that needs to be done with what has now been cleared from it.

A common problem with task management systems is the length of time that entries remain unexamined. Action lists contain items that no longer reflect current reality. Things that seemed like good ideas at the time they were written down are no longer priorities, no longer practical, or simply no longer interesting.

Hard landscape items on calendars are as valuable for seeing the discretionary time between them for working off action lists as they are for tracking the appointments themselves. For calendars, action lists, and other support material to work effectively, they need to be examined and updated regularly; otherwise they fall into disuse, and the mind takes up the slack for tracking actions and projects, which is unscalable. The short-term memory space, the “mental RAM,” that defines our attention span is too limited to track dozens of projects simultaneously.

Many people are surprised to find that when they collect and process everything in their lives for the first time (paperwork, email, verbal commitments, inchoate plans), they typically wind up with 40 to 60 projects and 100 to 200 next actions. This load is overwhelming directly to the degree it’s kept in the mind instead of an external system. The system needs to be complete and current for the mind to trust it. The goal is to keep your mind clear.

To maintain a trusted system, schedule a meeting with yourself at least once per week — a Weekly Review — to add missing actions and projects, to eliminate completed ones, to eliminate or reevaluate ones that are stuck, to update support materials, and to reconsider active projects and someday/maybe options.

Schedule the weekly review in advance. As with physical exercise, weekly review sessions should be done to a protocol, not on a whim. Doing a weekly review when the mood strikes is a formula for failure.

How long should a weekly review take?

The honest answer is: as long as it takes to no longer have anything on your mind. As you complete your review, you reach a tipping point where you can start to feel your stress and preoccupation with “all the things” you need to do melt away — it becomes like a 21st Century form of meditation. You catch up with yourself, bringing your relationship with the small and large changes in circumstance that have accrued over the last seven days into harmony.

The practical answer is: one hour. Many erstwhile adherents of GTD undermine their once-per-week discipline by either scheduling two or more hours for the weekly review, or not scheduling the review at all. If your review is excessively long (scheduled) or open-ended (unscheduled), you’ll end up looking for or creating gratuitous actions and projects to fill time.

A more refined answer is: start with one hour, then adjust the time incrementally as needed. You may actually need two hours, or possibly 30 minutes — when everything is off of your mind, you’ll know. But to get the ball rolling, commit to a one-hour dash, then reflect on whether or not you have any open loops that still need to be closed.

When should the weekly review be done?

The best way to know is to experiment. As a freelance writer I have the luxury of doing a weekly review any time, but I schedule a 90-minute block on Saturday mornings between 8:00 and 9:30 at the café around the corner from me. When I had a real Monday-to-Saturday job, I scheduled the review on Sunday morning. I personally prefer doing weekly reviews on off days, since nothing gets work off of my mind like a weekly review.

Others prefer to do their review during the workweek, in the office. A frequent opportune time is Friday afternoon, when work is winding down but coworkers, clients and vendors are still accessible. Some people schedule theirs on Wednesday to get a “second wind” in the middle of the week. I found that I was too conscious of the surrounding bustle to do a focused weekly review at work. I should have had the discipline to disengage from the commotion, but couldn’t muster it. Others find that having all their workstation’s resources at hand — from general reference files to personnel — makes a comprehensive review easier.

What should the weekly review consist of?

It’s always a good idea to work from a Weekly Review checklist to work from rather than memory. The sequence can very according to your preferences, but a checklist for a thorough review should include at least the following:

• Collect all loose papers, from receipts to contracts, and put them in your intray or “In” folder
• Process all email in your inbox until it’s empty (see Inbox Zero for the true meaning of an empty inbox)
• Review your calendar for the previous week, deleting or rescheduling items as needed
• Review your calendar for the following week and beyond, ensuring that it’s up to date, adding new items as needed
• Review any relevant project support materials, like plans and checklists
• Do a mind sweep: write down any thoughts or intentions that are potential actions or projects
• Process your papers and your mind sweep, discarding, filing or crossing off each processed item
• Review your Next Actions, eliminating now-irrelevant ones, reevaluating undone/unclear ones (they may simply need to be reworded), replacing completed ones with new ones for their respective projects
• Review your Project List, adding new projects, deleting completed and abandoned projects, ensuring that each active project has at least one next action you can take to move it forward, and moving uncommitted projects to Someday/Maybe
• Review your Someday/Maybe list, adding newly postponed items from your Project list, adding new potential projects, eliminating items no longer worth considering
• Brainstorm and capture any new ideas that may have occurred as a result of your mental housecleaning

The exercise analogy holds. The longer you wait between reviews, and harder it is to resume the habit. Your mental inventory keeps piling up, making the process of dealing with it that much more daunting. So do your best to make weekly reviews weekly.