FacileThings

The Weekly Review, Revised

AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez DATE: July 16, 2015

It’s been just over a year when we developed the guide to do the Weekly Review in our GTD app FacileThings. It’s a tool that provides you with the necessary work structure to help you consolidate the habit of reviewing.

During this time we have found different points of improvement, thanks largely to the feedback received from our users, and the time has come to apply them.

So here are the improvements you will find the next time you do your Weekly Review:

Projects Review

The projects review is the step of the Weekly Review that includes more updates:

projects review

We added the list of Waiting Projects. Actually, it is in the Weekly Review where you should ask yourself what projects could be re-launched.
We added the option to create a new project. Although the decision to create a project is taken when you process something that will need several step actions, it is true that we sometimes we forget it. Here again you have the opportunity to open a new project.
We added access to all project lists. At the end of the day, when you’re reviewing a project, it never hurts to have all its information at hand.
A new icon will highlight in-progress projects for which there is no next action defined. There should be no active projects without a next action established. This icon highlights these projects so you do not forget to handle them.
Independent scroll for the project list. If you have many active projects you will be able to scroll over them without losing sight of the rest of the information.

Review of the Someday/Maybe list

For me, this is the hardest point of the Weekly Review. I have over 500 items in this list, and honestly, I skip this point nine out of ten times.

We have implemented our particular version of the Not This Week list, which removes the elements that need not be reviewed on a regular basis: topics that you want to write about, books you’d like to read, music you want to download, countries that want to visit, etc. This way, the Someday/Maybe list is reduced to the set of elements that you really need to check each week. In my case, this set is about one third of the whole list, which makes it now very manageable.

You just need to write the list of tags that you want to exclude from the Weekly Review and refresh the list (an auto-complete tool will help you type the tags). The tag list is saved so you can reuse it every week.

review of the someday list

Other improvements

The Past Events step don’t show today events anymore, as they also appeared duplicated in the Next Events step.
The Refresh button did not always work well in the review of Past Events, Next Events and Waiting For list. That is fixed.
The use of keyboard shortcuts PgUp and PgDown to move forward and backward the steps in the review has been improved.
Although you probably have a routine that reminds you when you have to do the Weekly Review, now the application will show highlighted the Review option if you did the last one more than seven days ago: