Terry Starbucker has posted an article on The Mid-Year Leadership Check-Up: 10 Ways To Stay On The Path To Success based on his New Year’s “checklist” of 10 things we needed to do to make it a great year.

1. Take Stock of the Victories – We started the New Year by pausing and reflecting; it’s time to once again “come up for air” from the deep dive of our busy business lives. Make sure you take a day, or even just a morning, to have an informal chat with your team to consolidate your learning from the first six months.

Mid-year is an excellent time to celebrate individual achievements. So often these victories get lost in the whirlwind of the end-of-the-year activities. They can be announced informally to everyone in your organization and have a very positive effect on morale.

2. Analyze and Absorb Your Current Position – Just like we “studied” up in January to know our business plan inside and out, we need to analyze and absorb the year-to-date operating results, so we can make meaningful comparisons (and more importantly, any mid-course corrections).

With the first half of the year behind you that means that youstill have six more months to achieve the goals that you set for yourself, your team, and your business. A short meeting with the principle players in your organization can quickly analyze areas of concern and lay out a plan for dealing with them.

3. Perform a Self-Assessment – Take a look at those “fine print” tendencies that you filed away earlier in the year – are you pushing too hard? Did you micromanage anything you should have backed away from? Or did you overcompensate and not push hard enough?

One of my favorite managers from a past job used to say, “When in doubt, ask.” Ask yourself these questions, but, more importantly, as the people that report to you. Their answers can help you develop personally and professionally as they build trust and teamwork.

Starbucker has seven more exercises for you, I recommend reading the entire article. Then put these Action Steps into your system for completion by the end of the month. You won’t regret it.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Today is Groundhog Day!

Well, actually it’s Easter, and I am at the Tavern preparing to serve a couple of hundred people our buffet. But since I can write this in advance, and you can read it at your leisure, here we go!

It is time to review my Third Period Goals, then give a brief outline of what I have planned for the Fourth Period (5 April to 4 May 2010).

The Third Period was a little more challenging than I had expected. Most of my goals and projects that I had initially planned revolved around my own home business, rather than my work at the Tavern:

Period 3 – Due 4 April

1. Maintain exercise program – use Twitter or Facebook for accountability?
2. Read 1 book per week
3. Create 1 free product (Like the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context)
4. Work on the Productivity Book

   • Write Conclusion
   • Send out for copy-editing
   • Prepare cover art
   • Contact possible reviewers
   • Brainstorm freebies and bonuses
   • Create outline for story
   • Brainstorm characters/roles
   • Map out basic plot
   • Start writing!
5. Brainstorm ideas for new training courses

Unfortunately, most of my work and accomplishments are not on this list. I got quite a bit of work done on assignments that “magically appeared” on my Kanban Board at the Tavern, but this list suffered a bit, especially the book.

So, here are the results:

Exercise program – “C”, I managed to get motivated to make this a part of my morning routine, sorta. I did the exercises at least 3 days a week, not as much as I would have liked – but it was an improvement over the previous period.

Read 1 Book per Week – “A”, I was able to complete reading 5 books this period (Moby Dick is still in progress). They were:

• The Non-Designer’s Design Book – a very good read, referred to me by my colleague David Seah. I learned some good tips about designing text layouts that I can put to use on some product ideas that I have coming up later this year.
• A Spectacle of Corruption – Historical fiction about election processes in 18th century England (much more interesting that that description sounds!)
• Prague – a twisty-turny novel about American and Canadian ex-pats living in Budapest in 1991. No one even goes to Prague, they just sit around in clubs and bars talking about going there. I should not have finished this one…kindof a waste.
• The Dante Club – more historical fiction, this time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell team up with 19th-century publisher J.T. Fields to catch a serial killer in post-Civil War Boston. Highly recommended.
• Rework – a “business” book, Jason Fried and David Hansson describe the surprising philosophies at the core of 37signals’ success. Well, let me tell you I am quite inspired to put them into practice. Highly recommended. A full review will be published later this week.
• Moby Dick – the eternal classic. I haven’t read this in years so I thought I’d go for a sail with Ishmael and Ahab.

Create 1 free product - “A”, This was a decent success, as I created the new newsletter for the Knowledge Exchange Summit. If you have not signed up, well, you will have another chance this Thursday as we will be meeting again to discuss our businesses and share best practices.

Work on the Productivity Book - “F”, This is where I get embarrassed, because I have not done a single thing on this project. Primarily because I did not schedule time to work on it, I did not do any of the research I wanted to do, and I am sorta scared of doing it.
I did not follow any of my own advice, tactics, or procedures. This means, of course, that the book project is going to get moved to the front of the line for the next period. Importance and Urgency have both increased for this and it deserves to get the attention.

Brainstorm ideas for new training courses – I did this at the beginning of the period, and will be sharing these later.

Third Period in Review

I would say that I did okay this period, perhaps a “C”? I definitely learned that I need to work smarter on planning/scheduling time for working on my book, or it will never get written.

My journaling was much better this period, and I am looking forward to managing my time at the Tavern better. Now that the good weather is here (to stay?) I will be adding morning walks to my exercise program. I also invested some time is setting concrete deadlines for my actions and goals outlined for this period, returning to the important words: Focus and Discipline.

Which leads into planning for the next period:

Period 4 – Due 5 May

1. Create 1 free product (please contact me if you have any ideas for products that you would like to see)
2. Create 1 salable product
3. Maintain exercise program
4. Read 1 book per week – Books on the list:
   • Making Ideas Happen (I actually got a jump-start on this one Saturday)
   • Race Through the Forest
   • Remarkable Leadership
   • Blind Justice (I can’t read only business books!)
5. Market and launch e-book, real book – This obviously must be changed!
   • Create outline for story
   • Brainstorm characters/roles
   • Map out basic plot
   • Start writing!
6. Prep for SOBCon – this trip to Chicago is canceled for me, there is just too much going on at the Tavern that weekend, I cannot get away.

There we are. Ready to rock-and-roll. Later this week I will post about my plans for writing the book, and how the research is going.
In the meantime, do you have any ideas for products that you would like to see as a free offering? Leave a comment.

The following are Amazon Affiliate links to the books I read this period that I think you may be interested in:

Today is Groundhog Day!

It is time to review my Second Period Goals, then give a brief outline of what I have planned for the Third Period (4 March to 3 April 2010). I am not going to call these review/planning periods “months” or “monthly” because there will only be 11 of them, including the year-end review on 12 Dec.

I have been good at keeping the promise I made to myself to be diligent with my Weekly Reviews, taking careful notes, and saving all of my planning sheets. I also created a pretty cool flowchart for marketing and linking the new products that I plan to create this year with the existing product/service line.

This flowchart was enhanced and improved in a recent meeting that I had with my friend Dave Seah, in our Knowledge Exchange Summit last week. The KES is a pretty cool new thing that he and I are going to do this year, and we will both be writing more about it this month. To get in on the discussion and find out more about the KES please register for the newsletter, here:

Email Marketing You Can Trust
If you are reading this via RSS and can’t see the sign-up form, please click on the post title to come to the website and register. Thank you!

Second Period Review

My Period 2 goals were a little more ambitious, focusing on seeing some positive progress on a major goal that has been back-burnered for too long.

1. Maintain exercise program – Fail. I pretty much gave up on this, I must re-focus. I need more accountability for this to work…
2. Read 1 book per week – Success! I actually completed 5 books this period (All of these books will be the subjects of more detailed reviews in the KES newsletter – coming soon):
   • SWAT (review at the link)
   • The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield – an amazing book that I will be reviewing next week and hosting a contest for a free copy
   • The Next 100 Years – a look at the world’s geopolitical future
   • More Space – a book of business essays that I read last year and wanted to catch up on the ideas. I wondered if any of the predictions had come true…will be writing more about this later this month
   • The Devil in the Kitchen -  a book that I received for Christmas, about Chef Marco Pierre White
3. Work on the Productivity Book – This goal has been revised and re-designed after reading SWAT. I need to approach the book from a completely different angle!
   • Add Kanban implementation - Done
   • Write Introduction - First draft done
   • Organize Chapters - change to Organize Appendices
   • Create Artwork - Not done. I have to re-think the artwork needs, as the entire concept has changed from that of a technical manual to a business fable
4. Staff Evaluations (@Tavern) – Half done. Scheduling conflicts with some of the staff has stretched this out to a second week.
5. General’s Club Rollout (@Tavern) – Done! This has been very effective, and all of the delegated processes are in place for handling registration, data entry, and mailing Welcome Packages

Overall, I am pretty excited about how this program is working. I would rate the effectiveness as “high” and my morale and motivation are very good as well. It is just the exercising part that has me stymied.

Here are some details from my Periodic Review notebook:

• My exercise routine was hard for me to follow. For some reason I just can’t get motivated to do the exercises, whether I tried to do them first thing in the morning or later in the day.
• My biggest waste of time: I hate to say it, but this entry was very consistent – being at the Tavern. Business was pretty slow, especially this past week due to the “threat” of blizzard conditions every day. The level of business in the off-season requires that I be there to keep an eye on things due to the lack of being able to pay a supervisor to do the “babysitting”.
• The best ROI that I recorded came from my days off from the Tavern, where I was able to spend some time with the Lovely Bride and we could enjoy ourselves. She works days, I work nights, so we do not get a lot of time together during the week.

Action Steps for Improvement

As part of the GHD review, I think that it is important to look at the failings and successes of the period and learn from them. What did I do well, and why? What did I not do well, and how can I improve?

I suspect that my exercise problem has to do with accountability and with revising my morning schedule. Everything that I do when I first get out of bed is pretty standard, and has been for a while. This means creating a new habit, which is a pretty difficult thing to do. I have been keeping a checklist on my Kanban board for logging the days that I exercise, but that just isn’t working. I need to put it in a more conspicuous place. And I need someone to push me.

More on this later. Here are my new-and-improved goals for the next period:

Period 3 – Due 4 April

1. Maintain exercise program – use Twitter or Facebook for accountability?
2. Read 1 book per week
3. Create 1 free product (Like the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context)
4. Work on the Productivity Book

   • Write Conclusion
   • Send out for copy-editing
   • Prepare cover art
   • Contact possible reviewers
   • Brainstorm freebies and bonuses
   • Create outline for story
   • Brainstorm characters/roles
   • Map out basic plot
   • Start writing!
5. Brainstorm ideas for new training courses

So far, so good. Just writing this post has been very revealing and cathartic. I feel really good about this program and encourage you to create something like it for yourself. Send me an e-mail [stephen at stephenpsmith dot com] if you need help, I’d love to see some more folks get involved and share their progress.

You can still join in on this running experiment, leave a comment or email a link to your own post.

Chris Garrett has put together a 7-day mini course on business blogging, which you can learn more about here at Simple Web:

Of course the site talks about “content sites” but we know blogs and content sites are the same thing, right? There are a couple more things you need to know

1. Even if you do not run a for-profit site, all the same ideas are relevant

2. The site is about Joomla rather than WordPress, but ALL the principles in this course apply to any blog

3. You will need to add your email address to get all the parts in the series

Get the first part and sign up for all the entries here.

I have been taking the course over the past week or so, and here are some of the things that I have learned:

Day 1 – Planning Your Site

When many people think of creating a website for their business, organization or self, the first idea that comes to mind is the standard “corporate” style site consisting of basic “about” information, followed by a contact form.

Truth is those kinds of site have limited value. The proof is, of course, in your own online behavior. What kind of site do you visit most often? I bet you find content sites more useful and therefore visit them far more often.

We like to keep abreast of news, read tutorials and how-to guides, be informed and entertained.

This is the truth, and something that I evangelize to my clients. The important parts of the first lesson are:

• State your goal
• Define success and how to measure it
• Choose your niche and your audience
• Create the persona for your site
• Make an offer for valuable free content

Day 2 – Researching Your Niche

Focusing on your audience will mean you are always providing what people want and need, in a way that they find compelling. It’s so much easier to promote something that people actually want rather than create something then try to find a market for it!

• Challenges – If you can empathize with what your audience is struggling with then you can become their knight in shining armor!
• Purchases – What are your audience buying and why?
• Education Needs – Are there phases that your audience go through from newbie to black belt? Do they prefer text, video or a mix?
• FAQs – Which questions come up over and over?

Already you will be generating content ideas. Some ideas will be useful as articles, some ebooks, others for glossary and other reference type material. Next we need to find the exact phrases people use to describe issues, and how many people are looking for those phrases …

This is important information, as knowing your audience is vital to the success of your effort!

Day 3 – Setting Up Your Site

Features

Once site owners realize how easy it is to add features to their site they tend to get carried away. Remember your visitor is there to find useful content, not get distracted by gizmos!

The important features you might consider are:

• Contact Form – So the reader can contact you rather than copy and paste your email, also will prevent you getting as much spam.
• Comments/Community – Build a sense of community by sparking discussions
• Search – Allow your reader to find content by searching rather than click-click-click browsing.
• Ecommerce? – Do you want to sell products?
• Email Subscriptions – Keep your visitors coming back over and over by allowing them to sign up to an email service where you can notify them of any new articles or news you post up.

This too is good.

Day 4 – Managing Your Content

Writing Great Content

Here are some tips for making sure your articles have impact:

• Have a point – The most important tip of all is to make sure everything you write has a point, and gets to it. Nothing will put off a reader more than if your articles do not put forward a clear idea, piece of advice, item of news or some other benefit. Start with what you want the reader to take away and make sure your content builds up to just that.
• Think ‘So What?’ – The litmus test for if you have achieved the above “point” tip is to ask yourself if the reader will be thinking “So What”. This goes for your headlines and links too. People can agree, disagree, be motivated to take action or sent to sleep, but make sure they never ask “so what”.
• Don’t force it – Readers can tell if you are forcing out content. If it is not flowing, do something else for a while rather than try to force yourself to write.
• Write like a person – Your High School English teacher is not reading, so it is safe to write as you speak. People connect more with people who write like they are speaking directly to them rather than dry, academic style formal writing.
• Draft, then edit – Don’t edit as you write, it stunts your creativity. As much as possible get into the flow then come back to polish later.
• Read your content back – A great way to know if your writing is going to work is if you read it back, aloud. If you find yourself running out of breath trying to get to the end of your paragraphs you know you need to tweak!

You will notice I have not written about great headlines and being persuasive. While those things are important and can help you create more traffic and sales, it is also important at this stage of the game for you not to feel intimidated. Don’t set the bar too high for yourself, just write and enjoy writing. Providing you offer something, create some sort of value, and it is readable enough to make sense, then people will be happy to read.

More good advice, in fact hundreds of posts have been written about these basic ideas. I highly recommend this course for people just getting started on blogging and social media. Get the first part and sign up for all the entries here.

In the previous post I linked to an article by Kelly Forrister about being at your best in a tough situation. Here I would like to suggest three things that you can do to get back up to speed when an unexpected change comes your way:

1. Take Stock of the Situation

Stop and take a look at your last Weekly Review notes, to get caught up on where you stood the last time you gave your Actions and Projects a review. This will freshen your mind and perhaps trigger your thoughts for the coming week.

2. Review Your Hard Landscape

Review your calendar, Waiting For, and Next Actions lists, making sure that anything you might have had planned gets re-scheduled if you missed it. Some time-specific events or notes may no longer be valid, and perhaps a deadline was missed and the Next Action is no longer appropriate. On the other hand, a Next Action or Waiting For that was not pressing may now need to be moved up on your list of priorities – becoming a Most Important Task for today.

3. Plan Ahead for the Next Weekly Review

Anytime your schedule gets thrown off, by illness or an emergency situation, it is important to plan for your next review of Next Actions and Projects. Make an appointment with yourself to get back into your routine. I would recommend blocking out some extra time for this next Weekly Review in order to do some extra brainstorming and/or creative thinking about where you are and where you want to be. This kind of activity can give you a jump-start into the following week, providing inspiration for future goals rather than prolonging the feeling of “playing catch-up”.

Bonus Tip: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Letting things go for a while due to unforeseen circumstances can create feelings of frustration and anxiety. Remember that (in most cases) you can ask someone for assistance. You have friends, associates, family, and co-workers that you can likely go to for some assistance in completing tasks that need to get done. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of perspective.

Asking for assistance can be one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself.

This is the final post in this weeks’ Periodic Review series. It is inspired as my own productivity practice has evolved quite a bit over the past two years, since I have been writing about Getting Things Done and other workflow systems.

In the previous posts we looked at how to manage your Periodic Reviews, starting with a high level of granularity and developing a personal method that works well for you.

In this post I am going to show you some of the tools that I use to manage my workflow.

I have tried and evaluated many different tools and applications, and changed everything more than once. Here are some things that I have learned about myself via this process:

1. I do not like digital or online applications, for whatever reason, so I do not use them properly and any workflow system that I try to use that relies on one will collapse.
2. I do like my notebooks and paper lists. I like them very much, and any workflow system that allows me to utilize these sorts of tools works. I mean really works. Since I started using the new notebook method in January I have not missed a Weekly or Monthly Review!
3. It is important to make things as simple as possible but no simpler. For me this means two things:
   • Having just enough complexity to keep things interesting without letting things get lost in the system.
   • Requiring just enough effort that I get a feeling of satisfaction simply by completing my tasks.

Here is a short video of how I manage my lists:

If you can’t see the video, click on the title of the post

I realize that there are people out there that swear by their smart-phones or PDAs, but they just do not work for me. That is the most important part of any productivity workflow system – it has to work for you.

Later this month or in mid-May (UPDATE: the e-book is being finalized now and will be released in August, 2009) I will probably be releasing a new e-book that describes how to really get down to the core of what works for you in your productivity system. If there is anything specific to your own situation that you would like this book to address, please send me a e-mail with the form below.

[CONTACT-FORM]

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.

This is Part Four 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.

The Quarterly Review Checklist

Designed to be a supplement to the Monthly Checklist, the Quarterly checklist guides your focus onto longer-term goals and higher-level values. You can download the checklist here – The Quarterly Review.

1. Review 3-5 Year Goals ~ Is it still worthwhile? Always a good question for clarifying intentions. Can any of these get moved up into a new category such as @Next Actions, @Projects, or @1-2 Year Goals? Brainstorm one thing that can get done this Quarter to advance one or more of these goals.
2. Review Career Goals ~ Are you where you want to be? Where do you want to go? What Next Action can be undertaken this Quarter to advance your career goals? Use the Tickler File to help track your progress.
3. Review Purpose ~ Are your Principles still in line? Brainstorming will help most here.
4. Review Lifestyle ~ Once again, are your choices still valid? In line with Values and Principles? Are your Roles and Current Responsibilities in harmony with the Lifestyle you have? With the Lifestyle that you want? What are two positive changes that you can make to improve your lifestyle this Quarter?

Another dated archive folder should be created to contain this Quarterly Review and the attendant Monthly Reviews. Take good notes that you incorporate into your system as it is currently running, with a copy of these notes in the archive.

You will want to review this Worksheet and these notes at the following Quarterly Review in order to track your progress. In addition, you will want to do an Annual Review at the end of the fourth Quarter, in which you review the results of the Quarterly progress reports.

I do not expect this to be taken as the be-all and end-all of Review Checklists, but I look at it as a good starting point for directing the evolution of your GTD system.

In the next post I will describe the process that I am currently using, which is an offshoot of this checklist workflow that emphasizes accountability and goal-setting.

UPDATE: Sacha Chua has put this form to good use. See what she did here.

This is Part Three 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.

The Monthly Review

The Monthly Review is an expanded version of the Weekly Review. You can download a copy of this checklist here – The Monthly Review. The first five Actions on the Monthly Checklist correspond directly to the Weekly Checklist, and should go quickly.

Keep in mind that the end of a given month may fall mid-week, or between your normal Weekly appointments. My own strategy in this case is to replace the weekly review nearest the end of the month with a monthly review.  Of course, your mileage will vary.

The second half of the Monthly Checklist is a little different than the Weekly:

6. Review Someday/Maybe list ~ Are your Roles/Current Responsibilities in line to achieve these far-off goals? Can any of them be moved in the category of @1-2 Year Goals or @3-5 Year Vision? It is important to keep an eye on your long-term goals, so that they do not stay in the category of “long-term goals”.

7. Review Roles/Current Responsibilities ~ The Monthly Review has a new number seven: The concept of Roles is from Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People“, and these roles should be reviewed monthly, checking your progress on the goals that you have set. If there is a disconnect between these roles and your long-range plans, now is the time to fix it.

8. Review 1-2 Year Goals ~ Is the Goal still worthwhile? This is an important question to ask yourself, as conditions may have changed or you may wish to increase (or decrease) the importance of certain aspects of your life. Is it appropriate to move any of these goals into @Next Actions or @Projects?

9. Review Support Files ~ This is the same as the Weekly Review.

10. Brainstorm Creative Ideas ~ Focus on your Roles/Current Responsibilities. Are there any that could be changed or improved?

Again, when you have completed your Monthly Review with its notes, archive it in a dated folder, so that you have easy access to it at the end of the quarter. You are working on a larger scale now, so incorporating a scan of your Monthly Reviews into your Quarterly Review will aid in keeping you on track to achieving your long-term goals.

The next post in this series will look at the Quarterly Review.

Welcome to Part Two 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.

The Weekly Review

The Weekly Review has real power, the power to heal your mind and let you get your things done. Left undone, life and work come at you too fast for your overloaded mind to keep up. Once again you will find yourself overwhelmed, surrounded by “opportunities to excel“.

When you are surrounded by things that need to get done, tasks to be accomplished and calls to be returned, you can get the feeling that you have nowhere to turn. Without a coherent plan you will have no way to decide what choice to make, and then the feeling that any choice is the wrong one will leave you paralyzed, only to submerge beneath the waves of tasks and responsibilities.

So what do you do? What’s the next action?

Be Prepared.

Block out some time in your busy schedule and create a plan for managing all of the pieces of your weekly review: what to collect, how to process it, where to organize it, when will this all get done?

The short answer is “now”.

The Weekly Review Checklist is designed to keep your Projects and Next Actions from slipping through the cracks in your memory. Following from the principle of “ruthless iterations”, it occurred to me that a Monthly Review and Quarterly Review should also be incredibly useful tools for keeping myself on track (these will be explored in upcoming posts).

This is how the original system was designed, following this Weekly Review Checklist. I recommend that if you have never done any sort of regular review procedure that you take a look at this worksheet and use it for 4-6 weeks (or longer). This will train you in the habit of evaluating the various components on a regular basis.

Note that some of the contexts may not apply to your own situation, or that you need to add additional contexts specific to your own needs. In that case, I left some blanks on the worksheet for you to use.

1. Review the Tickler File ~ Look at all of the folders/pages from the past week, making sure that everything was done. Re-Tickle anything that didn’t get done, if appropriate. Jot down any ideas that occur to you while reviewing and put them in the In-Box.
2. Process the In-Box ~ I use this time to pay bills, update my checkbook, file receipts and papers and notes, clean out my wallet, and other little “housekeeping” chores. After the in-box has been emptied, I review and clean up the hPDA.
3. Calendar Review ~ Simply reviewing the time-specific actions and information from the past week. Does any of it need to get archived for possible retrieval? Finally, in the spirit of efficiency, I process any emails that are sitting in the inbox.
4. Project Review ~ First I close and archive any completed Projects, prepared to jot down any ideas that occur to me as I do this. Next, I update current and forthcoming Projects on the @Project List by asking myself if the Project is still worthwhile. I have saved a great deal of time by letting go of projects that had turned away from the original goal, or if the goal of the project had shifted. While reviewing each Project, I can check the status of Next Actions that are in @Waiting For, and tickle or calendar a contact action for the person responsible for getting back to me. (Do not actually email them now, the purpose of this exercise is review, not do)
5. Next Action Review ~ Clean up the @Next Action list with the focus on “is the action/project still worthwhile” and “what is being waited on“. This is the third time the @Next Action list has been looked over by now, so any Next Actions remaining should be valid.
6. Review the Someday/Maybe list ~ Has the Review brought any ideas to the front of your mind that need to be logged here?
7. Review Support Files ~ Scan through these files and archives for inspiration.
8. Brainstorm Creative Ideas ~ What would your current projects look like from beyond the completion date? Envision wild success, what is the best possible result? Capture the features, concepts, and possibilities that you imagine as a result of this success.

When you have completed your Weekly Review, archive it with your notes in a dated folder, so that you can access it easily at the end of the month. Incorporating a scan of your Weekly Reviews into your Monthly Review is very important to your overall success.

The next post will discuss the Monthly Review.