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This is Part Five of the Periodic Review series. Originally written in the Spring of 2007, “The Weekly Review” described how I went about completing this part of the GTD system.

My own practice has evolved and grown into a richer and more useful review appointment. Therefore I am up-dating this post and adding some additional details and practices that may make your own review practice easier and more productive.

Growing out of the system

After using this checklist-oriented system for a full year, I decided to take a look at how it could be streamlined. After asking some of the readers who had been following along and using the system as well, there was a consensus that it was just a little too much.

At least, after a while, it was too much, and not something that everyone needs to do 64 times a year. We determined that the Weekly Checklists were a very good training tool for getting control of your inputs and your workflow tracking system. It also allows you to find the holes in your system and plug them. Depending on your own level of ability and motivation, the checklist-based system might not be the best for you.

What should you do?

The most important feature of any productivity workflow system is that it works for you. If this set of checklists is too constricting, or too vague (I have heard that it is both!), then by all means pick out the parts that work and use them. Perhaps you have no need to perform some of these steps weekly, or at all. Cut them out.

Perhaps you need to do some of these checklist items at the beginning of the week, and some at the end. Split your Review appointment.

The checklists are not written in stone.

Accountability and Goal-setting

After some time I stopped doing complete Weekly Reviews, because I was managing some of the contexts more or less frequently than the checklists called for. After this happened I started to notice that some tasks and actions were dropping off the list due to changing priorities and conditions, which normally is an acceptable and predictable situation.

But I wondered about two things, if those listed items were important (even urgent) at some point in the past and now they were not important or necessary, what happened:

1. What had changed that I did not need to “do” the action, and perhaps more importantly,
2. Why had I not completed the task before the situation changed?

Where was the accountability? David Allen’s Getting Things Done system explicity avoids prioritizing your tasks and actions, and I believe that this is a mistake, or at least a weakness. What is needed is a way to analyze one’s tasks and next actions in the context of how important they are in the current environment and the expected future situation. What is needed is less emphasis on a weekly analysis of tasks – replaced by an increased emphasis on a daily evaluation.

Likewise Goals need less monthly attention, rather they need more explicit action steps with more frequent progress checks.

Creating a Mixed-use Solution

The Lovely Bride and I did a lot of traveling this winter, 7,000 miles in 4 months. It is pretty hard to maintain any sort of complicated system while traveling cross-country in a car. I needed a simple, low-maintenance solution that kept track of all of my tasks and provided an opportunity to achieve the goals that I had set. This is what I came up with:

My weekly review process is now more of a journal entry, with an emphasis on taking a good, hard look at what got done last week – and what didn’t.
The first part of the entry is a list of the tasks that I had set for myself that did not get done. These are tracked by my daily MIT lists. Now that I am giving this daily list more attention every morning the items that are ‘left over’ are much fewer.

I can then analyze these tasks and determine why they did not get accomplished and what can be done in the future to prevent or avoid that condition.

The second part of the entry is based on this list of Questions for Review (download).

• What will I improve on next week?
• What was my biggest accomplishment?
• Am I closer to my Life Goals?
• What was hard for me this week, and Why?
• What was the biggest waste of time?
• What was the best Return on Time Invested?

Asking myself these questions every week has had a very powerful and positive effect on my daily activities. I continue to utilize the Monthly Review Worksheet each month, with a greater emphasis on setting specific actions for longer-term goals.

I look forward to getting your feedback, please leave a comment.