So, here it is, Friday afternoon, time for my weekly review, one of the pillars to GTD. I’ve found these reviews to be extremely helpful in staying on top of things. While essential to the GTD process, it’s an excellent concept whether you proscribe to those teachings or not. In an effort to document my GTD system, I’ll attempt to do this review while I’m writing down the steps, as I do them.

Step 0: prep

Lock the office door. As far as everything else is concerned, I’m not here. I do not take phone calls or answer the door during my Weekly Review; this is sacred time.

The “Next Week” and “July” folders get dumped into my inbox. The “Next Week” folder then goes in the back of my daily ticklers, and the “July” folder goes back into the front of my monthly ticklers. I’ll be documenting my ticklers later.

I also get a nice clean batch of pre-printed “Project Details,” “Project Notes,” and “Project Outline” papers and set them out on my desk.

Also time to put on some weekly review music. Today’s music is Mogwai’s “Government Commissions.”

Step 1: The clearing of the head (Collection)

I go through my Weekly Review Checklist item by item, writing down anything that pops into my head on a “Project Details” form or index card, which are then put into my inbox. While I won’t have anything for a lot of the items, I’m usually pretty careful to spend at least a moment or two scanning the brain before I move on to the next item. If I do write something down, I’ll spend a moment or two making notes, but I’ll not get in to a full-fledged project outline at this point. This step is just to clear the head of things not yet written down.

Once the checklist is completed, it goes into the inbox, too.

Step 2: Go through the inbox (Processing)

The inbox gets emptied onto my desk. Things in it are put in one of several possible places:

• If it’s a task for next week, I’ll put it into the folder for that day (for example, my Weekly Review Checklist goes into “Friday”). Several of the things that were in the “Next Week” folder are index cards with a task and a repeat value on them, for example, “Check ePO’s system compliance — every Monday. Run reports 2nd and 4th Mondays.” This is how I keep my recurring tasks in my tickler. In the case of the above example, that card will go into the “Monday” folder.
• If it’s a recurring task for another week, it’ll get put into the monthly folder (in this case, a reminder to update the Debian machines goes back into “July.” It’s to happen every third Monday, and next week is the second Monday. While “Next Week” might be more appropriate, I normally don’t use it as a place to hold recurring tasks. I use the “Next Week” folder for tasks that come up during the current week that need to be postponed. Recurring tasks go in the months. Why? I don’t know. I guess that way I don’t have to think two weeks ahead. (“Now, is next week is the second week, then the third week stuff goes…”). I’ll just process everything that’s this week; everything else is monthly.
• If it’s a project, I’ll put it in my binder under the appropriate context. This is just processing, I’m still not organizing the project into an outline or next actions.
• If it’s a hard landscape task, like meetings or whatever (which I also make cards for), they’ll go onto the “Weekly Planning” page in my binder, as well as the appropriate day. In this way, I can keep my time-based schedule in one place (the binder), without having to go through folders for Monday - Friday looking for time-based information.
• If it’s little more than an idea, it’ll get a lineitem in the “Someday/Maybe” list.

I’ll also process my “Five Week Planning” calendar, to make sure that the weekly planning page is in sync with the big picture. Meetings and stuff that made it to the Five Week page should have also had cards, but I’ll look at the pages again, just to be sure, and make cards if need be. I’ll also copy stuff that’s now on the weekly planner into the five-week pages.

Step 3: Project processing (Organization)

Now it’s time to look at my projects. As I’ve written previously, I’ve got my project organized by context. So I’ll go through my contexts, and each project within them, making sure that:

1. I’ve got the outline as complete as I can make it, and
2. There’s at least one Next Action, Waiting For item, or Contact Agenda item for every project.

There’s been a lot of talk on the 43Folders group about whether or not a project can have more than one next action. I believe it can. Several times I’ll have stuff that can happen in parallel, where one task is not dependent on another. For example, my biggest project right now is the moving of my users from one mail server to another. I’ve got different ‘threads’ of that project happening at the same time. Right now, I’ve got two: asking for student volunteers to test the web-based mailer on the new server, and moving office personnel. There are several next actions there; soliciting the students, moving person 1, moving person 2, etc. There’s no reason that all those next actions can go on the sheet at the same time; they’re not dependent on one another. In this particular case, though, I won’t put everyone that needs converted onto the NA list, just a few.

This is the most time consuming part of the review process for me. I’ll also take a few minutes to jot down a note or two as I think about each project. If I find myself really getting in to the planning of a particular project, I’ll take it out of my binder and put it into my inbox, and I’ll do more thorough project planning when the other projects have been touched. This is to both force myself to get back ‘on task,’ but also it’s a good opportunity to do really good planning after the WR is done.

If I cannot think of a NA for a project, it’ll go in the inbox, too. I need to figure out if this is a real project, if it requires sub-projects, or if it should be tossed or moved to a someday/maybe list. But now is not that time. Now is the time for making sure my projects that I know I have work for are progressing.

I’ll also take a minute to look at my Waiting For forms at the end of each context, and adjust things accordingly (Is it time for a status check on something? Did something get resolved?)

Step 4: Someday Maybe items and lists

I’ll take some time perusing my someday/maybe items and my checklists. Any progress made on the “Things I want to learn about” list? Is it time for something to move off the “Someday” list and into a context (with a Next Action)? Is there something else that has come up in the review that needs put into this list?

Step 5: Process inbox, again

At this point, my weekly review is over. But could still be some things left in the inbox, ie, projects for which I was unable to come up with any progression items. They’ll get dumped on my desk again, and something done with them. Either they’ll go into the Someday/Maybe section of the binder, or in a “Completed Projects” folder in my file cabinet. Either way, something will get done with them.

Now that the review is finished, I can feel very good about being organized come Monday. It really is quite reassuring as I go through the weekend to know that everything, while not done, is handled.

The process isn’t as good as it should be, and I’m sure real GTDers among us can point to countless things that I’ve done wrong. This is just as much a work-in-progress for me as anything; I’ll change the review as I learn/develop better habits.