The Weekly review - a keystone holding your Getting Things Done (GTD) practice together

The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the entropy or the state of disorder of a system always increases with time.

Likewise, our attention and energy tend to dissipate away from our areas of focus.

Weeds naturally creep into a garden. And akin to gardening, the ‘Reflect’ stage maintains and nourishes our Getting Things Done (GTD) practice and offsets the impact of the entropy.

It’s easy to ignore the weekly review. It’s not urgent. It’s not ‘doing’.

Yet it is the vital keystone that keeps the GTD structure together.

All of our Projects, active project plans, and Next Actions, Agendas, Waiting For, and even Someday/Maybe lists should be reviewed once a week.

So how do we sustain this vital step of GTD?

• Don’t do a mega review- Keep it short. 30 minutes or less.

• Schedule/time block on your calendar. Ideally the last day of your workweek.

Here’s what to review by order of priority. This is not an exhaustive list.

1. Calendar – Review the upcoming 1-2 weeks.

2. Project list – Review, update, archive, delete

3. Next action/ tasks – Review, update, archive, delete

4. Desktop/ downloads – process your inboxes on the computer, phone, other digital and analog devices

5. Notes (non-actionable reference items) - process inbox (from your notes app)

Even if you do a few steps, you will feel the sense of relief and control in life. And you will keep your GTD system humming along.

David Allen - "The Weekly Review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it".