Weekly Review Challenge (August 2014)

Barb

Registered
Hello, everyone!

Our August challenge will build around David's "Up Close" from July. In this segment, he talks about moving to Amsterdam without a whole lot of research ahead of time to see what would be required to stay, etc. After I finished hyperventilating over how casually he and Kathryn apparently have taken this overseas move, I enjoyed listening to his enthusiastic description of beautiful Amsterdam.

Like all segments, there is a nugget of gold here as well. David talks about really making sure you have all of your projects outlined and making sure you've captured all of your open loops in terms of the project level. Remember project thinking also involves outcome thinking so we can reference the Natural Planning Model for that. I know I can get really lazy here and I wonder if others are like me. So let's discuss improvement opportunities, tips and tricks around the project level during the August Challenge. Here are links to David's Up Close in video and audio.
Video:
https://gettingthingsdone.com/connec...5&trackid=1250

Audio:
https://gettingthingsdone.com/connec...4&trackid=1249

This month's prize is the Getting Things Done with Work-Life Balance CD set, so post each time you do a review to enter the drawing.
https://gettingthingsdone.com/store/product.php?productid=16489&cat=252&page=
 

MikeP

Registered
WR #1

The first Weekly Review of August took most of the day Friday and I wrapped up some of the personal stuff Saturday morning. This weekend is supposed to be rainy and dreary which should give me some time and inspiration to compare my Areas of Focus mindmap to my projects as well as to clean up my Weekly Review checklist. I have had these on my list for a while now but outdoor work usually takes priority on the weekends.

I learned something new about my list manager (Evernote) today which should make future WR smoother: When I have a notebook selected (such as my Next Actions stack) I can then filter by tag (which correspond to Areas of Focus in my system) using the tag icon in the upper right of the screen or from the list on the lower left. I think I figured this out once before but for some reason I insisted on copying the list to Excel to do this in the past.

I can't imagine casually moving to another country the way David did but I guess that when your lists are complete and current you can tell if you have the bandwidth to take on something like that. On a personal and much smaller note, because my lists are fairly current and complete I was able to drop everything and take my daughters to hang out with my Mom at a dog show this morning.

Mike
 

Hrlakat

Registered
I got back on the GTD bandwagon this week - yay! I am embarrassed to say how long it's been since I've done a good weekly review :sad:.

Anyway, I spent a few hours cleaning out old projects, moving some of my someday/maybe items to checklists in OneNote (books to read, places to go), to clear up space in my iPad OmniFocus app.

What I find interesting in light of the August challenge that Barb outlines above, is that I have been avoiding planning some really big projects because I'm not really sure what I want as an outcome. Do I continue my friendship / relationship with so-and-so? Do I change careers now that I've done everything that sounds fun in my current industry? etc.

Heather
 

MikeP

Registered
WR #2

My second Weekly Review of August went smoothly and was completed before leaving work. Getting to know Evernote a bit better really helped!

I'm looking forward to another rainy weekend as I need to do some planning around my upcoming vacation. I'm also really going to clean up my WR check list this time as we are having another GTD 14 Cay Challenge at work and my partner this time needs to instill this habit.

Where is everybody else?

Mike
 

John Forrister

GTD Connect
Staff member
I'm looking forward to a relaxed and thorough review this weekend. I had a chat with Meg about areas of focus, and got some cool ideas. I'll find a way to turn that conversation into a Coaches' Connection post from Meg.
 

FrDavid

Registered
First WR of August--phew! I'm trying something new--I'm going to do my WR on Sunday night instead of Thursday or Friday afternoon. I'm interested to see if that sets me up to really hit the ground running Monday morning. At the minimum, I think I'll sleep better Sunday night! :)
 

Hrlakat

Registered
Second weekly review done! Total of 498 personal projects with 127 active, though I might park a few of those over the next week. Since I'm getting back on the bandwagon, I made a "brain dead - home" list and I absolutely love it! Caught myself twice now saying to myself "well I can actually do THAT!" Wish I would have implemented that sooner :)
 

hikerpa

Registered
Weekly Review #1

I missed out on my weekly review last week. Too many fun things going on, which wasn't such a bad thing. So today I played catch up. I carefully went through my projects list to make sure that I had everything in order. My washing machine broke so I put together a quick project for finding a new one and it was installed at the end of last week. I'm working on making sure my projects have a clear outcome.
 

Barb

Registered
First good review in--FOREVER!

Wow, what a crazy summer! Thanks to everyone for continuing to post and for your inspiration. I hope to be more engaged very soon.

We leave tomorrow to go to Houston for my Dad's 90th birthday. A pretty big party is planned, so that project had lots of moving parts. After that, I hope life be a bit more normal....whatever that means.
 

apeikoff

Registered
I just did a quick review and had the pleasure of seeing things I forgot I needed to do, deleting things that were no longer relevant, and recommitting to other things. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this. I have some backlog to process now, so will revisit on Friday, which is my new official review day.
 

John Forrister

GTD Connect
Staff member
Barb said:
First good review in--FOREVER!

Wow, what a crazy summer! Thanks to everyone for continuing to post and for your inspiration. I hope to be more engaged very soon.

We leave tomorrow to go to Houston for my Dad's 90th birthday. A pretty big party is planned, so that project had lots of moving parts. After that, I hope life be a bit more normal....whatever that means.

Happy birthday to your dad! 90 is quite an accomplishment.

As for normal, when I find myself wishing life would get more normal, I like to recall Doc Holliday telling Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, "There ain't no normal life. There's just life, and you get on with it." I may not have that exactly right, but that's the gist of it.

And the Weekly Review always makes life more manageable, if not more normal.
 

SiobhanBR

Registered
WR #1 for August

Having just got back from a vacation during which I pretty much stayed off-line, this weekly review was crazy! Work is (almost) back under my control (still a few (66) emails in the inbox but at least I've scanned them all now), but I forgot my iPad at home this morning so I will need to do my personal review over the weekend. Lots and lots going on (did I say crazy already?) but with GTD at least I know that I know what I can't get to! :)

I love checking projects off as done. Almost as satisfying is finally admitting I will never do it (I still have some relevant reports to read from 2013 but I got rid of a bunch off my list that I decided won't start fire if I don't read them - I still have them if I ever do need to look at them!).
 

Jenn

Registered
WR # 1 for August (# 27 of 2014)

It's been over two weeks since my last review but I had a great 10 day vacation in there and it was worth the break.

I had to use these posts to remember when I last did my review so that I knew how far back on my calendar review to go. It was quite nice to look back through my vacation and remember all the fun things we did. My forward calendar review had an added check of any required travel since I am about to renew my passport and will be tied to home until the new one arrives.

It's been a year now since I made GTD a regular practice and today I had another session with my staff on GTD - one on managing email. I really hope that they can get as much out of the practice as I have. Meeting with them helps to renew my energy to take mine a step forward as well.
 

Oogiem

Registered
WR #1
I have actually been doing a decent if not complete weekly review but I realized I haven't been posting here so you're going to get slammed with several messages in a row. :)

My first review of the month actually started late and didn't get done until the 4th. I was still finishing my summer classes and the one I was taking had a lot of stuff that needed planning so I could complete it in the remaining 2 weeks. I realized that my projects for the rest of class were not planned at all well so I concentrated on my Continual Learning AOF and specifically spent a lot of the review finishing the planning. I know, I should have just put plan those projects on my lists and moved on but given my calendar review I knew time was going to be tight and I decided that getting the plan for that critical work done well then was more important than a lot of other stuff. I totally ignored my on-hold or someday/maybe projects completely. Turns out there were some lurking but that is for next weeks comments.

What worked. I went into the month with a clear picture of the work needed to finish my summer class. So far I am holding on to straight A's in my Master's program and now it's becoming a goal to complete the program with all A's. Especially since I was only admitted provisionally. I want to show the school that sometimes paper scores lie about a student and her motivation. ;) So completing my required coursework with a top score is now a very important goal for me.

I also realized during that part of my review that I usually lose points and get marked down on my research papers because I do not follow the APA style perfectly. Particularly in how I list and use references. So I added a new project with a very high priority to try to learn the APA style. I'd been using the Scrivener template but it was cumbersome and I never really did much about learning the proper style from the APA web site.

I also found a number of things that were in the calendar review that were coming up that needed work. I did go through and put something like 20 projects on hold to clear my lists for the next few weeks. Normally I like to keep all project I can do in a season active but it was getting overwhelming so I dumped some back into Someday/Maybe.

I had a time limit for this review so I stopped before doing much else.
 

Oogiem

Registered
WR # 2

This one got done in a place I never do them. Out in the back cedars pasture on my iPad while guarding the sheep with my rifle. We were running short of grass and the back pasture had some decent feed. BUT, 2 people have seen a young tom mountain lion at midday on the property next to ours. A calf was killed by either a bear or lion on the mesa 2 properties over and there is at least one sow with 2 cubs and another yearling bear on the mesa. They have been seen by multiple people. In the larger area one range flock has killed over 50 bears so far and is still losing 3-6 sheep a night to them. The flock behind us had several of their guard dogs killed by bears and on the mesa just across from us a bear broke into a friends house at mid day. Another acquaintance on the mesa adjacent to us had bears come in and kill all of his chickens and also attack his dog. In town there are at least 3 different bears roaming the streets all day and night. The police and sheriffs have said to not go out at dawn or dusk and to watch young children and dogs. Needless to say putting 177 tasty sheep out in the back near the bear highway and with enough trees to provide cover for the lion is risky. So we decided that no sheep would go out there unless we had 2 dogs and a person on guard at all times. What it meant was that my husband and I tag teamed who was guarding the sheep. He took his kindle out ad got a chance to finsih several books he's been wanting to read for a while. I took my iPad and did my weekly review.

I am again reminded that I really hate reviewing on my iPad. I just cannot get used to seeing all my projects at once for review and STILL can't see how to review just active, just pending, just stalled or just on hold projects at one time. The review was also interrupted a lot because after each page of projects on my iPad I'd get up and take a check around the pasture, rifle in hand. I did get to go through the on-hold projects and discovered a few that were going to blow up in my face within a week.

I was able to check off a lot of actions that had actually gotten done but I'd never marked off. That was a very satisfying feeling. I also continued my more detailed project planning on a few critical projects. I had no Internet access out there so it was all off-line and that actually helped me stay focused. I realized that I often go off on the net to look up information or verify something even during my reviews. I also realized that planning a project on the iPad isn't bad at all. I have enough tools including my reference material that I can easily flip from writing notes, to pulling in references to doing a simple drawing and back to Omnifocus for my lists fairly easily. That gave me the idea to add a project, currently on hold, to go get the latest versions of the software pieces I use and see what else could be added to make my iPad a better project planning tool.

One of the projects that had been on hold forever that I discovered was gong to be a problem is printing pictures for my scrapbooks. Because it's a hobby task I had just dumped it into on-hoild and ignored it while I focused on school and LambTracker. But when I did my detailed review of on-hold projects I realized that I have a pre-paid print plan that will expire soon. If I don't want to just throw away that money I need to get the pictures I want to print for my scrapbooks off my phone, onto my computer, cataloged, sorted and then uploaded and printed. The entire scrapbook picture workflow got interrupted last December when I switched from carrying a separate camera to using my iPhone for all pictures. I had never really fixed the automatic downloading, automatic adding to the catalog and other pieces of the workflow that made dealing with those pictures easy. So I ended up using my sheep guarding time to plan the projects to update that workflow checklist and get my pictures caught up and printed before my plan expires.
 

Oogiem

Registered
I just finished WR # 3 for the month.

My school class ended last Thursday and I got a chance to spend almost 6 hours catching up on clearing my inboxes. I had 2 papers due the last week and really tried to follow the APA style accurately so they took a while. I find that standard is foreign to how I want to see references when I read so I have a hard time doing it that way when I write. But for the class I needed to really do it so I worked hard on that. I haven't gotten my grades yet, I hope I did better. I should find out this coming week how I did.

The project to raise the chickens for dinner and for sale this year is nearing the end with the first batch going off to slaughter last Friday. We picked them up and started customer deliveries on Saturday. This project also needed some additional planning. Our regular place to take them to be butchered closed this year and we are using a new place. It's further away to drive and even though it's not far it really effects how we do the scheduling. Plus we have changed how we buy chicken feed so figuring out what the costs are to raise the birds is more difficult. I buy feed at the store and put it on account., Once a month I pay the account with a credit card to get points. We pay off the credit card each month, never carry a balance, but it means that the information on the costs is delayed by almost 2 months. Chicken food is a lot more expensive per pound this year, up almost 50%.

This delay combined with the issues of having my identity stolen and needing to change credit cards and switching to all on-line statements has just totally messed up my monthly financial planning projects including my how to price the chickens part. I did not get them all cleaned up but did get a couple started. Fortunately my chicken customers don't really care the exact cost so whenever I figure it out they are fine with that. We usually settle up after I've delivered all the chickens anyway because we trade them for bread and vegetables so it's a matter of documenting the cross sales. We don't exactly barter, just track our accounts and at the end of the year we each give the other a check for the items we've bought from each other. It usually works out to be about equal. We eat about as much bread and vegetables as they get in chicken and sheep but it's easier for taxes if it's not barter so we continue to track it and do it via checks.

Good news is that it looks like even though chicken food is a lot more expensive, the birds are growing faster and to heavier weights so the cost per pound of chicken meat looks like it will be lower. My labor is going to be less because we'll get all the birds to butcher several weeks earlier this year. I'm still running the numbers but instead of $6.60/lb for our dressed whole birds I think I can sell them at $5/lb and be ok. That will really help my customers if it all holds out once the final costs are in.

This review is also planning for the last of the late summer work. It's time to weigh and wean the older lambs and give vaccinations to the younger ones. Weather is still an issue so I have to check with who I can get to come help us and when to get that done.

Anyway, a bit of a catch up with life on the farm and using GTD.
 

Hrlakat

Registered
Weekly review #3 done! I moved a few more projects to someday / maybe and the someday / maybe parking lot (not sure who had this idea - but thank you!), so now I'm at 75 active personal projects.

I forgot why I fell off the wagon last time. I work overseas from time to time, and I'm moving into a very high travel period for me. My work stuff is not in OmniFocus, and my company won't let me use Omni for tracking etc. And I ADORE Omni for weekly reviews!

So I'm stuck with either paper (which I don't see working for me, as I get 200-300 work emails in a day) or Outlook.

I tried setting up Outlook with the guide earlier in the year, but I don't think I was able to stop the water hose effectively for things to get bucketed properly. Will print out the guide and take it with me - will see what I can get done during a long haul flight.

Good luck next week fellow GTDers!
 

MikeP

Registered
This Weekly Review went smoother than ever. We are having another GTD 14 Day Challenge at work and my partner this time is trying to get the WR habit going so I cleaned up my checklist and shared it with her. This benefited me as well as it had become a bit junked up and I also made some enhancements since I was messing around with it.

This week's WR was about beginning to clear the decks for vacation. A number of things moved to SMB.Weekly and had a clear direction to plan what I would focus on this coming week.

Now if I can just survive one more week before I get a week of blessed relief!

Mike
 

hikerpa

Registered
August Weekly Review #2

This weekly review was fairly smooth. I spent a good portion of my time going over Projects to make sure everything was order. I only had one new project to add to the list. I've been off for most of the summer so I'm returning to work in a few weeks and looking forward to it. I'm hoping that once I return I'll still keep my weekly reviews up to date. It seems I do much better when I'm off.

Ellen
 
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