And I’m sure to throw away, file, or shred everything as soon as it’s appropriately captured. Any new commitments I add to my calendar, new reference material to Evernote, and new open loops to Things. Next, I go through any mail or other papers that have accumulated in my physical inbox. These first two items make up Part I of my review, making sure there’s no emergencies and laying the foundation for what comes after: My rule of thumb is to look two weeks into the past, for anything I need to follow up on, and 4 weeks into the future, for anything I need to start preparing for. Nothing too unconventional here: I put down any new commitments, and review existing ones to get a sense of the week. The next item is the calendar, since I want to know what the hard landscape of my day and week looks like as early in the day as possible. ![]() I’m not doing anything, just deciding what needs to be done. That’s why I follow One-Touch to Inbox Zero, starting with the oldest email and making a decision about where to send each one: to 1) my calendar app, Busycal 2) my task manager, Things 3) my reference app, Evernote or 4) my read later app, Instapaper. There is a risk here - that the sheer quantity and urgency of my emails will throw me straight into the vortex, drowning me in adrenaline. I start with email, because no other decision I make will be correct without the latest information. Let’s walk through the checklist step by step. This confidence produces an almost meditative state as I proceed through the list one item at a time. I’ve put enough design thinking into it that, in the moment, I trust that all open loops will be appropriately handled. I follow the same steps in the same order. It doesn’t matter if I’m checking in after a couple calm days of work, or returning from 3 weeks of vacation. It can handle any type of information, from any source, in any quantity, over any period of time. Here is the checklist, which I keep in a little yellow stickie note on my desktop:īut this short checklist represents something very meaningful to me: the ability to go from total chaos to total clarity in 15–30 minutes. But its simplicity illustrates the Weekly Review’s real potential once you get it nailed down: to free up time, attention, stress, and overwhelm far out of proportion to the time it takes. It is deceptively simple, and not necessarily right for everyone. ![]() I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time and energy testing and tweaking and thinking about my own weekly review, and I’d like to take you through it here. I know someone is ready to be their own Workflow Designer when they start challenging my rules and prescriptions with well-reasoned principles of their own. In my trainings and courses, I attempt to create a supportive environment where people feel safe enough to attempt to design their own. It is the backbone of everything else that happens during your week the master program on which all other programs run the environment that creates the context for hundreds of small decisions and behaviors.ĭesigning operating systems is also one of the most challenging feats in the software business. I think a good model for thinking of the Weekly Review is as an operating system. It becomes an exercise in stoic determination, sticking to the plan in hopes of uncertain future rewards. This instability creates an intense cognitive dissonance around Weekly Reviews - we know we should get good at this practice, and yet we also feel in our bones it is not worth the effort required. They take long enough to require dedicated focus, yet not long enough that it would make sense to dedicate a full cycle. They are too consistent to fall into the “opportunistic, when needed” bucket, yet not consistent enough to fall into the “daily routine” bucket. ![]() They happen frequently enough to be lynchpins in your weekly productivity, yet not often enough to be natural habits in your daily productivity. I think I know why, based on my experience with habit formation: weekly habits exist on an unstable middle ground. Allen has noted and I have seen many times in my own work, that even dedicated GTD practitioners have trouble maintaining the cadence of weekly check-ins at a higher horizon. Yet it is also the most difficult habit to maintain. ![]() In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen calls the Weekly Review the “Master Key to GTD.” He claims it is the single most critical habit one must adopt to capture open loops, manage commitments on an ongoing basis, and maintain a “mind like water.”
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