GTD Getting Things Done Review

Alright GTD apprentices, today we are going to tackle how I do my weekly review. As the master, I feel the pressure to be completely thorough in my discussion of the review process so I will do the best that I can to walk you through it in words, pictures and video.

Before I get into the weekly review that I follow and consider a master level, keep in mind that your setup may vary and you can still be considered a master GTD’er. What matters is this: you have pre-thought your review and broken it down step by step so that you don’t forget to complete anything in your weekly review and you do it consistently week in and week out.

What follows is my meticulously detailed system and setup. So let’s begin.

Let’s review the GTD checklist that David Allen put together in his book – Getting Things Done. You can find it starting on page 185. Here is his outline of the weekly review:

1. Gather loose papers
2. Process your notes
3. Previous calendar data
4. Upcoming calendar data
5. Empty your head
6. Review project lists
7. Review next action lists
8. Review waiting for list
9. Review any checklists
10. Review someday maybe list
11. Review pending and support files
12. Be creative and courageous

That’s the basic checklist for the GTD weekly review.

How to master your GTD weekly review

When I started doing weekly reviews, they took some time to get through. Why? I spent alot of time processing because my inboxes were so full. After awhile, I asked myself, what should my review look like if I had it mastered and here is what I decided:

1. I completed a complete review of my GTD system once a week
2. I did it at the same time and place each week
3. I did it the same way each week
4. I did it as fast as possible and less than an hour
5. That I could do my review anywhere I might be (as long as I had a computer, internet connection and a printer)

Complete a GTD weekly review every week

There are 52 weeks in a year. Therefore, if I completed a review each and every week, I would do it 52 times. I expected that I would take some time off and made it my goal to complete 50 reviews each year. After that I made a checklist that listed each week of the year that I could check off.

Complete the GTD weekly review at the same time each week

I decided to do my review on Sunday night at 10 pm. I am a night owl, and it’s quiet. And, I knew that I’d be in my home office every Sunday night and would have access to my computer, internet and a printer.

When you are first starting out, you might find as I did, that the review takes a while and takes alot out of you. If your inboxes are backed up that is going to happen to you. I suggest that when you first start out doing your weekly review over a period of three days so that you can through a complete review each week.

Here is how I would do that:

Day 1: On day one, I would spend your time making sure everything is collected and process your email.
Day 2: On day two, I would spend your time processing your inboxes to zero
Day 3: On day three, I would spend your time doing the reviewing of your someday maybe list, project lists, next action lists, calendar and files

You’ll find that if you break the review process down, you’ll get through it more often, better and more completely.

When I broke it down this way, I spent Friday, making sure that I had gathered everything in one place, got all the nonactionable stuff out of my inboxes. I would also take this time to see what I hadn’t collected into my system and started putting it in little by little.

TIP: When you set up your GTD system, set it up clean and move anything that doesn’t have to be done immediately to a back up inbox. Then, take everything new and make sure it goes into your system. Add, your backlog in a little at a time. Repeat until all the backlog is gone.

On Saturday, I worked through my inboxes to get them to zero. At first, this was difficult. Eventually what I did was take each item out individually and focus on it only. I would then take the GTD workflow diagram found on page 139 of Allen’s book and lay it down in front of me. You can get a pdf file of it from his website. And, then I’d follow the diagram to get each paper out of my inbox. This was the largest part of my review, the processing part. Remember too, that the biggest mistake that people make as far as I can tell is trying to process all of their inboxes to zero during their weekly review and not each and every day. This is OK at first, but eventually, you’ll want to process to zero daily.

On Sunday, I would do a mini collection and processing and then review my lists and print them out. After that, I would put them in a binder to process during the week. At that time, I would also ask myself what I could do to improve my system and make it better and tweak it here or there.

By doing my review at a time and place that I knew I would always be and that had all the tools available to me, it would become a habit. I’m in a unique situation where I work for myself and travel for my job. It’s a good situation because I don’t have the distractions that alot of people do who work in an office situation. Whatever you do, taking the time to schedule your review without interruptions is critical to doing the review well. Either way, it takes discipline to do the review consistently, week after week and this is where a lot of people fail to really complete their system.

Complete the GTD weekly review the same way each week

While the GTD system, is amazingly simple, you can complicate it with all of the tools you can use, the number of inboxes and the volume of work that goes through it. I noticed that I would spend a lot of my time during the review asking myself “what’s next?” While, it’s the correct question, it’s not an efficient use of my time to ask that question when it should be routine.

So, I set out to complete my review in the same way each week. The way I did that was by writing down each step I took from beginning to end, no matter how trivial. I wanted to do this so I wouldn’t forget to take any steps along the way and could also do it in the same order each week.

By taking the time to write down each step of my weekly review down, and thinking about each and everything I wanted to accomplish, I could refine it in such a way that when it came to weekly review time, I wouldn’t have to think about what to do, I could follow the steps I had already pre-thought. I call this acvitity capture and by getting these processes out of my head, I had one less thing to think about.

To me it only makes sense to collect your activities in to checklist of steps. It makes sense to put things you have to do on lists and calendars so you don’t have to remember them, why not the routine. I’ve been much more efficient since I did  that.

This key step of writing down these steps is how to become a Black Belt GTD’er. That coupled with mastering each phase of your workflow from collection to reviewing.

Complete the GTD weekly review as fast as possible and under an hour

By completing the previous step of writing down each step of your GTD weekly review, you’ll save a trememdous amount of time figuring out what the next step is. By cutting this thinking out of the review process, you can work faster. You just look at the next item on the list and do it. The power of the GTD checklist is in breaking down each task into the very next action.

Once you have that down, the next step is to improve your efficiency is to improve the speed in which you do it. What I started doing after I made my weekly review checklist (and my daily review checklist as well) is by noting my start time at the top of my checklist and my end time at the bottom.

Once you know that you are recording your time, you’ll get a good feel for how long it actually does take and you can work on doing it faster each time. At a certain point you’ll know that you have reached your personal best time and also know what done looks like.

I have found that for me, knowing what done looks like is a powerful GTD benefit that Allen preaches. By breaking down your review and your work down into these types of checklists you’ll discover what done really looks like. You can then spend your time getting things done quicker and less time thinking that their is something you should be working on to make yourself feel better.

The amount of time you take on the review is up to you and taking the time to think about your projects at the 10,000 foot level gives you a clarity in purpose that you can only realize once you reach the level of a GTD where you have a complete and total project list and a complete set of next actions. Your mind empty, you can relax, content in knowing what you have to do even if you choose not to do it.

Complete the GTD weekly review from anywhere I have a computer, internet connection and printer

The final level to make sure that I completed my weekly review each and every week was to build my GTD system in such a way that I could have access it to anywhere and complete it from anywhere in the world.

I travel extensively for my job and have tried to make sure that my system is as portable as a possible. I encourage you to strive for such a system as well. I read somewhere where someone referred to keeping their system in the clouds, a reference to everything on line. And I agree.

I operate with a briefcase and a computer most of the time and can complete my review from anywhere because I have put all my lists on Basecamp, all my email in Yahoo! mail plus, and all of my calendar on Yahoo! calendar. Everything else I keep in my briefcase except for my reference files which are in a corner of my office.

The age in which we live is so different from 20 years ago, having the skills to work from anywhere, particularly when you work for yourself is crucial to being more productive.

Phase One: GTD Collection

Getting everything collected into your system is a major feat in and of itself. Keeping that way is a challenge too. The hardest part of keeping stuff collected is your paper and things you keep in your head.

If you are doing a good job of collecting everything in your inboxes, then that’s half the battle. The other half is making sure that you remember to check all of your collection buckets or inboxes. On the paper side that is pretty easy, but with digital collection, you might have more inboxes thant you realize. That’s what makes it more important than ever that you make a list of all your inboxes that you need to check and incorporate it within the collection process of your weekly review.

In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you also remember to check the places you might have put stuff that could possibly leak out of your system. The car, the kitchen table and your wallet are a few places thing can collect and not make it into your system. Make sure you remember to make a checklist of everywhere you need to look to gather ALL of your loose papers, notes and stuff for 100% collection.

When you do your review, take a notepad around with you and record each and every step you take along the collection path. All of the email, twitter, facebook, voicemail, physical inboxes. Make sure and include each and every GTD inbox you have setup.

After that, I usually take out everything that I can that is not actionable like supplies, power cords, etc so that when you start processing you are actually processing.

Phase 2: GTD Processing, Organizing & Doing

After you’ve collected everything into your GTD system, and weeded out everything that is not actionable, your left with inboxes that need to be processed to zero. Getting them all to zero, insures that all of your projects are on the project list and all of your next actions are on you next actions list. It makes sure that everything is on your calendar so that when you start reviewing your projects for next actions it’s all there.

The hardest part of processing is separating processing from doing. It’s easy to get sidetracked and doing the things you need to do when they show up in front of you and not just putting the next action on your lists and moving on.

Remember, to get your GTD inboxes to zero, you’ll need improve your processing skills. Do the things you can do quickly and move on to the next item. Following the workflow diagram I discussed earlier, made it a lot easier for me to move things through the system. It was difficult at first, but what I did was only focus on one item at a time and make decisions.

When you are new to the process, give yourself the leeway to take as much time as you want on each item. Take note of the steps you take to get that into and out of your system. Once you’ve been doing it awhile, you’ll discover that most of the stuff that goes into your system is the same thing over and over and it becomes easier.

The key to effective processing is having all of your organizational buckets set up, in particular your filing. I discovered that the only reason things go stuck in my inbox is because I didn’t know how to decide what to do with it or I didn’t have a place to put it.

Analyze your system, figure out why things get stuck and fix it.

Some other things I try and do is get all of the easy stuff out of the way to reduce my stack of stuff to do. This creates some momentum to push you forward since the hardest part of most of the work we do is in just getting started.

The other thing that I suggest is putting your processing into a certain order from easiest to emtpy to the hardest so that you push everything down into your physical inbox. Whenever anything gets stuck, get it on paper and out of electronic system and keep it moving.

Usually, I start checking my voice mail and text messages because I have found that I can get them to zero quickly. Then I move on to the next easy one. Eventually, I am left with two major inboxes. My email account and then my physical inbox. I start tackling my email action folder and then get email to zero. After that, I spend time going through my paper inbox.

The beauty of laying out your GTD review the way I recommend is that you can see precisely what level of black belt you are all of the time and here is how. If I have created a checklist for the whole process and I get all of my voice mail cleaned out and I get stuck, then I know that I am a black belt reviewer to my voice mail box level.

If I get all the way to my physical inbox and get it to zero and I don’t get any further, then I am a black belt at the physical inbox level. Once I get through all of the steps in my GTD checklist, then and only then am I a black belt GTD at the weekly review.

You should strive to get further down your checklist each time. This is going to require that have completed a review from start to finish and wrote down each step at least one time through the system.

Remember though that reviewing is the goal of the GTD weekly review, not doing. Doing comes during the rest of the week. It comes later. But you are doing some doing and organizing everything into the proper context to make deciding what to do alot easier.

Phase 3: GTD Reviewing

After your system is complete, you can then review your calendar and your lists to make sure that your system is actionable. What I recommend is starting with your someday maybe list for potential projects you want to work on and adding those to the project list.

After that I would review the project list for next actions. Many times, people wonder how many next actions they should add from each project and the anwser is at least one. In so doing, you give each project the best chance of moving forward towards completion.

You should alway be asking what’s the next action and adding it to the appropriate context list. With practice, you’ll find you are moving projects forward in nice easy steps and it becomes easier the longer you do it.

The important thing with GTD, is to take it in stages and to master one segment at a time, then work on another. Over a period of time, you’ll be on your way towards black belt GTD in no time.

It’s almost easier to show you what I consider to be a black belt GTD review so I did a walk through of my GTD weekly review in a video that will be below once it’s processed. I hope it helps fill in any gaps I may have left out. If not, be sure and leave a comment below and I’ll help you clarify it. If it’s not there, it will be there in a few days.