I followed up with an executive client recently whose biggest issue was that his GTD Weekly Review, when he “really did it right,” took sometimes 3–4 hours. He wondered if he was doing something wrong. I asked if it was worthwhile doing the review, and he admitted that it was critical to stay on top, but that it was “work” to keep it up. It didn’t ultimately seem to save him more time.
The truth is, it probably won’t save you more time—well, it will, but you will need that extra time to do the reviews and keep lists and categories of items current. Yes, you can get better and faster at how you do it. But it requires investment, no matter how good you are at it. As a matter of fact, the less you have time to do it, the more time you usually need to spend with it!
No personal management system can possibly come close to creating the perfect algorithm that will tie in all the factors of time, people, projects, actions, and support information with the infinite number of variables that go into our thinking about priorities, interests, and commitments. That’s why it becomes critical—once these are somehow objectified into an external system—that they be put in front of our conscious thinking process at least once a week, to get it all recalibrated to match our new realities. And I guarantee that there are some intuitive “Aha’s” lying dormant, only to be triggered by putting reminders about all the meaningful aspects of our life and work in front of our face on a regular basis.
The Weekly Review really is the glue that keeps it all together. And I know there are people out there trying to implement GTD who haven’t tried it. So until then, I must get up on the rooftop and yell at my loudest: “Weekly Review! Weekly Review! Weekly Review!”
Discover what it’s like to have the freedom to be dumb and happy, just following your intuitive hunches, 6.5 days of the week!
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I split the review up between getting clear and getting current based on one of the podcasts. That has made a huge difference.
Excellent Nithin!
Nithin,
Could you please specify your comment. Which podcast are you refering to ?
Thank you in advance.
The official GTD podcast did an episode on the Weekly Review. There’s a link at the bottom of this page to the podcasts. It was great. Separating out Clear and Current was one of the tips.
Thank you, this came in time. Mostly I finish my review in 1.5-2 hours, I don’t know what was with me yesterday, but it took maybe 4 hours, I was very disappointed with myself.
This is totally me! It feels great knowing I’m not the only one! I was trying to do mine in half an hour or an hour on Friday afternoons and an hour in, I’d still have a lot left. The size of it still keeps me from starting in on it. I think breaking it in into a couple of pieces helps me. I try to do chores in 10 minute spurts, getting a few in at a time. I think doing a couple of spurts on Friday afternoons would be good and finishing it up later would help. My problem is that my schedule varies a lot, so I don’t always have my Saturday morning to spend 3 hours to do my review.