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The weekly review
=================
So you've got your lists set up, and you process your inboxes daily,
and tasks flow smoothly through the projects and next actions lists.
How do you know everything is OK? You need to take a look at every
part of your GTD system, and your life, to make sure everything's in
its right place, and you've not forgotten anything.
The weekly review is a fundamentally important part of making sure
you stay on top of things. You need to review all your lists, and
calendars, inboxes, etc., and have a short meditative moment where
you reflect your life, and try to think of anything you may have
missed so far. If you do this regularly, and with some thoroughness,
you'll be certain that you've captured everything into your system.
You might not need to do such a review weekly. If you live a very
calm, regular life, you might only do it rarely. On the other hand,
if your life is a maelstrom, you might want to do a review more often
than once a week. Experiment, and see what works for you.
Here's my checklist for doing a weekly review:
* Process inboxes.
* Review journal entries since previous review. Write a summary of the
highlights of what has happened.
* Review calendar entries since previous review, and for the next month.
* Empty head from things.
* Review projects. Make sure each has at least one next action. Remove
any projects that are finished or aborted, or move them to someday/maybe
if that's appropriate.
* Review next actions list. Are they all of good quality?
* Review waiting for list and mail folder.
* Review pending and support files:
* physical folder at home
* folder in e-mail
* Review someday/maybe.
* Review "Read and Review".
* Review areas of focus, goals.
* Re-process inbox.
It usually takes me a couple of hours per week to do a good review of
the entire system. Sometimes more, if I do a thorough review of all
my open bug reports, for example, but I only do that if I have the
time, and haven't done it in a while. (A thorough review of the bug
reports tends to mean reading through everything, and sometimes checking
that bugs still exist.)
It's common for me to postpone doing a review, if I'm tired or busy
or have any of a number of other excuses. If it gets really bad,
I postpone the
review for months. In that case, it can take a bit of an effort to do
the review, which acts as further encouragement to push it forward.
The way I get out of that is that I need to be reminded of the strong
feeling of relief and being in control that I get after doing a review
properly.
I feel that I'm on top of things, that regardless of what surprises
the universe may throw at me next, I know where I am now and what I need
to do next. (And then I often go read the Internet instead, but that's
another problem.)
Other reviews
-------------
In addition to the weekly review, it is good to have another kind of review
about once or twice a year. For this, I find it's best to do a weekly
review first, and then concentrate on bigger issues: what do I want
out of life? How do I want to live in one year, five years, twenty years,
or in my retirement? What do I need to do to achieve those things?
I've not done much of that yet, so I don't have a lot of concrete advice
about that. I'll add more about it when I do.
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