Tools for Thought

For GTD users, the weekly review can be one of the hardest challenges to maintain. The general concept behind the weekly review is to batch the thinking about your entire workload during the week into a single short session, usually one to two hours, and periodically include more long-range planning.

The goal of the weekly review is to have nothing on your mind. During the week, you don’t have to think about with to do about most of your projects because you’ve already thought about them. You just need to act. At that point, you simply look at your lists to get the next action that moves that project foward.

The clarity of mind that results from a successful weekly review is a profound experience that can’t be replicated by tracking top-priority projects exclusively. As long as unexamined, potentially important tasks sit in the background of consciousness, the ability to focus on priority tasks will be less than optimal. A backlog of uncaptured, unreviewed thoughts results in continuous partial attention (CPA), where a person ostensibly works on a single task while mentally monitoring other thoughts and stimuli.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

But there’s no free lunch. Anyone who’s done a weekly review has seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but entering the tunnel in the first place can still be daunting. After all, we have to look at everything we planned to do the week before, but haven’t done. We have to reevaluate whether or not we’re still committed to certain projects. We have to identify new opportunities and make decisions on what to do about them.

Greasing the skids

The weekly review can be somewhat labor intensive, but there are ways to chip away at the process and get through it with less effort.

Schedule the review. It’s fine to do “mini” reviews during the week on a spontaneous basis, but weekly reviews are best done at regularly scheduled times. These reviews are essentially meetings with yourself, so block the appropriate time on your calendar, just as you would any other meeting.

A seat-of-the-pants approach to weekly reviews requires more self-awareness of how much “stuff” has reached critical mass than most people are capable of. I suspect that people who reach that threshold would be less motivated to do the review precisely because they’re too busy thinking of what they need to do to think about it from an elevated perspective. By scheduling the review you don’t have to monitor the buildup of stuff for a tipping point. You just do it because your calendar says so.

Work from a checklist. It may take place in one sitting, but technically, a weekly review isn’t an action you take but a project — a series of individual actions that yield a desired outcome. In that context, you can’t actually “do” a weekly review, but you can do its individual action steps. Rather than try to execute these steps from memory, have the steps right in front of you as a checklist. You can see the standard GTD checklist in this weekly review article.

Even if you’ve done a weekly review a million times, having a visual guideline for where you are in the process helps, since much of attention you would otherwise have available to remember the next step might be consumed as you immerse yourself in each step. Each item on the checklist acts like to buoy to help you resurface.

Collect separately. Ideally, the weekly review starts when you’re at “zero base” — when your in-basket, email inbox and voicemail is collected and emptied. But realistically, there’s almost always going to be some new input between the last time you processed your collection buckets and the weekly review. So if you do your review on Saturday morning, the “Collect loose papers” part of the checklist might include what landed in your in-basket Friday afternoon. What you don’t want to do is let your collection buckets accumulate throughout the week, then have to process that backlog on Saturday. You’ll end up anticipating the overhead and possibly resist doing the weekly review.

If you do find yourself with several days worth of inputs to process, it might be easier to block out this processing as a separate session. So you would process In on Friday evening, then do your actual review on Saturday. I don’t recommend doing this a habit, since it’s always more efficient to batch all steps of the review in one sitting. But if, occasionally, you’re too busy during the week to process your collection daily, it’s less intimdating to handle all of the processing in a single session if you don’t feel obligated to do the rest of the review immediately afterward.

Schedule planning sessions for complex projects. With a typical project, just figuring out the very next action to take is enough to regain or maintain momentum. If you’re still unclear about the project after identifying the next action, more planning needs to be done, which might entail making a checklist, outline, mind map or Gantt chart, depending on the level of detail. Whether it takes nine minutes or 90, you don’t want to use your weekly review time to analyze these few projects in full. If you have three projects that need more than a few minutes of focused planning time, they’ll interfere with the other 45 projects you need to review; so during the review, schedule an appropriate time to review each or all of them, and keep your weekly review time on track.

For planning sessions, err on the side of allocating more time than you need to prevent subsequent events from threating your focus. But if you find that you’ve clarified what needs to be done about a project well before the alloted time is up, stop and move on to something else. Don’t fill the time with excessive planning, otherwise you’ll end up creating activities for the project that are off the critical path. Plan to be productive, not busy.

(Photo credit: isabisa)