do a weekly gtd review

This was easier this week – I guess because I have a better grip on my inboxes, and because I spent a few hours on Friday learning about project planning and doing it for a few of my projects.

I’m also about to be out of commission for a few weeks so have far fewer projects than usual in the active phase, and that of course helps to have things under control too.

I do think the idea of making my own personalized checklist for the weekly review could be helpful in the future, but for now the David Allen approach is working. A bit clunky for me, but working.

Today was my second-ever GTD weekly review. I’ve been listening to podcasts on GTD for the past week while running errands, and I realized I hadn’t incorporated the project side of GTD into my weekly review, so that was the focus this week.

I updated my project lists (a few things were missing, but not many) and identified 3 projects that need serious planning time (which I will do later this week).

I went ahead and did the weekly review even though ideally I would have gone through all the inboxes beforehand. Just wasn’t possible for the home one, and the office one I had near zero when I started. Gmail is inaccessible from work (where I did the weekly review) and it’s fairly current so I figured it was better to do the weekly review imperfectly than to wait to clear everything first.

I did use the David Allen documents to check that I hadn’t missed something major, and I could see myself developing my own checklist to do this efficiently as time goes on.

I can’t say I found today’s exercise really enlightening, but I did see where in the future it will be a helpful routine. Right now my projects are few and my clarity is high, but that won’t always be the case.

One thing for sure, it’s a big time committment for me right now – it took about 2 1/2 hours, and that was doing it imperfectly. I am getting closer to trusting my system & having things out of my head, however.

I’ve toyed around w GTD for over a year but never really got it together to do a real Weekly Review.

One of my goals now is to start to really do them for several months & then evaluate what I think of them.

Today it went pretty smoothly, largely because my inboxes are zeroed and I just re-worked my goals so I’m pretty clear of what’s going on. I did re-check projects and managed to eliminate a few things, and moved a couple of things to Someday-Maybe.

I think I’ll need to work on a routine or checklist to do this well, but for today (being so current) it went smoothly.

Going to add this to my Outlook tomorrow. I am trying to use Remember The Milk to implement a GTD-esque system. Unfortunately/fortunately my workload has become such that I need a more structured system to ensure that I don’t let the day-to-day completely take over and end up never getting to long-term projects.

Will mark this off my list after 4 weeks.

I’ve been sort-of following GTD for over a year, but the weekly review has always eluded me.

I’m making it a goal, and through that goal I’ll reshape some of the things on my 43T list into someday-maybes as well.

I have to give up on this one for now. I need to work on processing before I have anything to review.

Last week’s list gets rolled over into a new one.

by force of Outlook reminder every Friday. It’s great. It works and so far so good.

I can’t seem to achieve this goal. I guess I just don’t work that way. To get things done there either has to be a pressing need here and now or it has to be something I really, really want to do. Maybe I’m just coded to be a live-from-hand-to-mouth-kinda-guy; aren’t creative people supposed to be that way, anyway? ;)

Oh well – maybe I’ll some day be mature enough to achive this goal, but at the moment I don’t see it happening anytime soon.

but I do a pretty good job of keeping on top of things, and so the formal review was superfluous. Summary: if you’re anal-retentive like me, maybe you don’t need to worry about the weekly review.