Getting Things Done - GTD
The Weekly Review: The Habit That Keeps Your Entire GTD System Running
AUTHOR: María Sáez
Brief introduction to the GTD methodology:
1. The Perfect Storm: Why Modern Work Overwhelms and How to Deal with It
2. Capture and Clarify: The First Two Steps of the GTD Workflow
3. Organize, Reflect, and Engage: The Three Steps That Complete the GTD Workflow
4. How to Get Started with GTD: Set up a System That Works and Make It a Habit
5. The Weekly Review: The Habit That Keeps Your Entire GTD System Running
You may have noticed that, throughout this series of articles, the Weekly Review has come up time and time again. We introduced it when discussing the “reflect” step; it came up again as one of the four essential habits for implementing GTD; and we also noted that it’s the way to get yourself back on track after a falling off the wagon. This is no coincidence. David Allen considers it the key to success for the entire methodology, and in this final article, we’re going look at it in the detail it deserves.
Strategic, not functional
During the week, your relationship with the system is functional: you capture what comes up in your life, clarify the contents of your inboxes, choose the next action, and take it. You work at ground level, tackling what’s right in front of you. The weekly review is something else. It’s the time to look up and take a look at the big picture, your personal and professional life at the same time, to check three things:
- That everything is in the system,
- That everything is up to date, and
- That the system remains 100 percent usable and reliable.
That last condition is fundamental. GTD works because the mind stops carrying the burden of commitments when it trusts that they’re stored in an external location. But that trust isn’t automatic or permanent. All it takes is for the system to fall out of sync for a couple of weeks for you to start doubting it, and as soon as you have doubts, your mind takes over again and tries to remember everything. The weekly review is the recurring maintenance that prevents that from happening.
And when it’s already happened, when you’ve had a chaotic week and the system has fallen behind, this is also the way to get back on track. It’s the step that gets you back on the wagon. You don’t have to start from scratch or reorganize everything; a quick review is all it takes.
Allen suggests setting aside about two hours at the end of the workweek, although everyone eventually finds their own time and pace. The important thing is to treat it like an appointment with yourself, with its own slot in the calendar, and not as something you’ll do if you have extra time, because you never have extra time.
The review is organized into three phases, and the order matters.
Phase one: gaining clarity
The goal of the first phase is to clear out the inboxes, and it begins with a sweep up on three fronts. The physical cleanup involves gathering loose papers, notes, receipts, cards, and anything else that’s been piling up on your desk, in your wallet, or in your backpack. The digital cleanup involves going through your email, notes on your phone, saved messages, the downloads folder, or your computer’s desktop. And the mental cleanup involves sitting down for a few minutes to clear your mind of everything that’s still swirling around in there, using a list of triggers like the one we saw in the previous article, in case you’re having trouble getting started.
During the sweep, you only capture items. Nothing is analyzed nor organized: everything goes into the inbox without having yet decided what it is or what to do with it. Mixing these two activities slows down the sweep and causes things to slip through the cracks, for the same reason we discussed when talking about capturing items in day-to-day life.
Then it’s time to clarify, but you should only clarify what you’ve just captured. One of the most common mistakes is turning the weekly review into the session where you clarify everything that wasn’t clarified during the week. Clarifying is a daily habit, so you should arrive at the weekly review with an empty inbox or very few items. If you arrive at the review with a hundred pending items, processing them will eat up all your available time and energy, and you’ll never get to the phases that truly make the review valuable. If that’s the case for you, dedicate a different session to catching up on that backlog before the review, and save this one for what it’s truly meant for.
Phase two: updating
With the inboxes empty, it’s time to go through the system list by list. This is the longest phase, and the one that ensures that what your lists say matches reality.
Start with your calendar, looking both ways. Look back to review the days that have passed since your last review and catch up on any follow-ups you may have missed: the email you promised to send after a meeting, the task that was left unfinished. Look ahead to anticipate what’s coming in the next few weeks and give yourself plenty of time to prepare for anything that requires advance planning.
Next up are the Next Actions and the Agendas. Check off what’s already been done and make sure each action is still relevant and clearly written, meaning it starts with a verb that describes a physical, visible action. “Think about vacation” isn’t one; “Look for flights to Lisbon for the first week of August” is. This review is also an invitation to reflect. If there are actions that have been on the list for weeks without you touching them, ask yourself why you’re procrastinating on them. Sometimes the answer is that they’re poorly defined and need to be made more specific. Other times, it’s because you don’t actually have a real commitment to them, and in that case, the most honest thing to do is to move them to the Someday/Maybe list. A list full of tasks you know you’re not going to do loses its value, because you get used to ignoring it.
Review the Waiting For list to make sure deadlines are being met. If something you were expecting is taking longer than is reasonable, it’s time to follow up on it, or make a note to do so.
The list of Projects is handled in a similar way, also starting with the wording. A project must be described using a result verb, and the question that helps you formulate it is: What needs to happen so you can check it off? “Website” doesn’t answer that question; “Launch the store’s new website” does, because you’ll know exactly when you’re done. Next comes the most important question: Are you still committed to each project? Pay special attention to the ones that no longer have a next action, because those are the ones that have stalled without you realizing it. You need to reassess each one. Either you decide to continue (in which case you define the next action that gets it back on track) or you acknowledge that now isn’t the right time and set it aside for now. What you shouldn’t do is leave it on the list as if it were moving forward.
This phase ends with checklists, the lists you use as recurring reminders. Going over them acts as a trigger. You often discover an area you’ve been neglecting for some time or a recurring task you’ve overlooked, and that leads to new actions or projects.
Phase three: applying creativity
Once you get here, you have a complete, up-to-date, and usable system, and that puts you in a rare state of mind, with a high degree of perspective and mental clarity. There’s nothing in the background pulling your attention anymore, and you know exactly what you’re dealing with. It’s the best possible time to think beyond the immediate, and you have to take advantage of it.
The main tool in this phase is the Someday/Maybe list, but the goal isn’t to go through it as a mere formality, it’s to review it creatively. Is there anything that’s now worth pursuing? Anything you’re no longer interested in and can cross off? Any idea that, when combined with another, gives rise to something new?
This is also the time to reassess your commitments as a whole, to ask yourself whether what you’re currently working on reflects what you truly want to do, and to capture new ideas, no matter how ambitious or far-fetched they may seem. Allen encourages you at this point to be creative and bold: with a clear head, ideas have room to emerge, and the system ensures they won’t get lost.
A reminder system, not a storage system
Some people, when they start using GTD, complain about having to duplicate things that already exist in other systems, such as the team’s project management tool, the CRM, the shared folder, or the incident manager. If all that already exists, why copy it? The answer is that in GTD, nothing is duplicated. What you keep in your system aren’t the items themselves, but reminders of them. Your project “Present the proposal to the client” doesn’t reproduce the content of the proposal or the team’s tasks; it simply reminds you that there’s an outcome you’ve committed to and what’s your next step toward achieving it.
What you do need is to be able to quickly access information when you need it. A good system doesn’t force you to search; instead, it takes you directly to the document, conversation, or folder you need to take action. The Weekly Review is a great opportunity to improve in this area. If, while reviewing a task, you have to stop and think about where the contract was or which email thread discussed the budget, add the link or the missing information. Week by week, the system becomes more accessible, and the easier it is to use, the more you’ll use it.
The habit that sustains everything
With this article, we conclude the series. We began with an introduction to the methodology, walked through its five steps, and saw how to implement it in our daily lives. The Weekly Review is the piece that ties everything together. Capturing, clarifying, organizing, and engaging are habits you can practice imperfectly for a while without the system falling apart; but if you stop reviewing, it will. Without a review, lists become outdated, confidence disappears, and your mind ends up shouldering the burden again.
That’s why it’s worth protecting. You don’t need it to be perfect or to last two hours. You need it to happen, week after week, because that’s what turns a collection of lists into a system you can rely on. And it’s that trust that allows you to give yourself fully to what you’re doing, knowing that everything else is waiting for you exactly where it should be.
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