Residue seems to have the habit of spontaneously showing up, but never going away, by itself. You have to work at keeping things streamlined and current. The mere passage of time can make meaningful things irrelevant. The Weekly Review is psychic spring cleaning. – David Allen
While I find the weekly review to be one of the most important parts of an effective GTD system, many people don’t even know where to begin.
My own thoughts on getting over that hurdle are here:
http://adamquiney.com/public_html/blog/wordpress/?p=375
The weekly review is the part of GTD I find the hardest yet I know its the key to being clear and happy. I’ll admit that I don’t do it every week. And when I do, it takes me all day or gets split over a couple of days. I’ve read that it takes time to hone it down to just a few hours.
Just my experience but I’m sticking with it and trying to master it!
I totally agree with Max. After I do a weekly review I feel like I’m on top of the world. But it takes me hours to do and that is the main thing that discourages me on doing it often regularly.
But I do a mini version of it just so that I can try to keep my sanity in this crazy fast world!
I agree! I seem to find it hard to get enough time to do the weekly review since I am always fighting fires, yet I know that when I do the review, there are many less fires to fight!!!
I will try to be more disciplined and set aside plenty of time! 🙂
Jonathan
http://www.photosforsouls.com
Two things I’ve noticed about the weekly review:
1. The most important part is just developing the consistency. Even if you only sit down for 10 minutes and process 1 thing, get into the habit of doing it every week. Once you’ve got the habit done, it’s easy to simply add a new item to your list of things to process.
2. The more often and consistently you do your review, the more efficient it will become. Doing it once every month means a fairly long process for me. If I’m on top of it and doing it weekly, it’s usually an hour or so (longer if I let myself start “doing”, instead of simply “processing”)
–Adam
Everyone agrees, the tasks review is a major concern that is very binding. Indeed, the tasks review is a dicipline that few of us manage to constrain ourselves. We feel, however, that it’s a key to our effectiveness.
I think the solution will come with tools that will be able to find a way to automate the tasks review. At first glance, this seems utopian. In fact, not that much, but we need to explore new ways. I found that the brakes to this innovation are not technical. The brakes are related to the strength of existing practices and tools….as always.
We see that people do not want to give control of their actions to a machine. they want to keep control of their ToDo Lists (of their lifes), they don’t want to trust a machine and are too afraid to miss something they must do.
Weekly Review? Ha! I can’t do a yearly review. I just can’t. And without it, GTD doesn’t work. Soooo……800+email backlog, fires all over the place, and never feeling like there is enough time for anything or everything.
But you know what? I’m having fun. And that counts for something.
I wonder if I will ever GTD again. Maybe…but probably not. Just do dang tough to keep up with.
That’s a fair comment Ryan, but I think what may underlie it is an assumption as to what a weekly review requires.
I submit that it doesn’t require anything, other than committing to spending X amount of time, on a weekly basis, to try and get on top of everything (to some extent, at least).
It’s your call to determine how much time X is, and how you spend that time (if your e-mail inbox is the biggest cause of stress and clutter, that’s probably where your energy should be focused first).
But either way – that stuff is going to need attention! You can make the choice to schedule it yourself and do it each week, or you can let your circumstances dictate when it happens (“Oh no, that assignment is due in two days, I need to drop what I’m doing right now, sort through my inbox and find the relevant e-mails, and figure out what the next steps are RIGHT NOW!”).
One way or another, we all have to sort and process – it’s just a matter of whether or not we proactively do it in advance and with consistency.
Bottom line – it sounds like a full-fledged GTD system might be too complex and overly-wrought for you, but that doesn’t mean that a more agile and less specified system couldn’t help you keep things organized.
I think GTD should come with a disclaimer that it has to be adapted to work within the confines of everyone’s own strengths and weaknesses.
–Adam
A GTD Weekly Review is a very specific set of steps outlined in the Getting Things Done book and it can look like what you consider gets you to place of clean, current, and creative.
This is the best part of the GTD system for me as well as the one that was the hardest to get down. In the beginning I kept telling myself if I do the GTD system all the time throughout the week I do not need a weekly review, when I really started to sit down and do it I started to realize the power of it.
Perhaps the most crucial element in the Weekly Review that has helped me tremendously is recognizing what worked and what didn’t (in regards to my implementation for that week). At the start of my weekly review, the very first thing I ask is, What has failed? and How can I specifically improve on it the incoming week?
I can’t improve on something when I’m not clear why it failed in the first place. Good luck GTD’ers.
– Jason
http://www.jasoncarpio.com