Daily review with ever changing working hours

D

darkdepth

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Hello everyone,

I would like to get your opinion about this subsject.
How are you dealing with a daily review when you come home late in the evening or in the morning after a night shift.
I feel like there is not much mental energy remaining to do some good clarification or reviewing work.
This way everything has to wait till the next day or when I wake up.
 
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There‘s not much of a daily review process or daily planning in GTD, so it’s not something you have to do. On the other hand, when I’m tired I’m often most realistic about what I can get done.
 
From my perspective, it depends on what one means by "review". If it means "quick glance over actions, projects, and calendar for the next day or so then making sure everything in your inbox is processed" then that shouldn't really be taking any more than 15 minutes as it is largely just getting your inbox to zero then doing a brief overview of the current commitments for the next day or so. If it means something equivalent to the weekly review then that is somewhat unrealistic for the vast majority of people.

This is a common misconception I see regarding GTD: doing a daily review. Personally, I do not recall reading anything about doing a daily review in any of David's books or any of the official GTD materials. Perhaps it hails from the classic GTD terminology: Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Do? People may have often misinterpreted the "Review" step and misconstrued it to be some kind of overkill "Review" session. I would imagine this kind of factor was a part of the reason for the update in 2015 to the modern GTD terminology: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage as these terms are more fitting to the fact that GTD is about the overall shift in mentality/approach and less "tactical" to a large extent.

Doing a daily review can be helpful for some folks, however, it is not a specifically recommend best practice from GTD, as far I as understand at least, because as you are witnessing: it takes too much time, energy, and effort to review your system in its entirety that often. GTD only recommends the weekly review because it is just short enough that the vast majority of items will still be relevant and just long enough that there will be an adequate amount of change in a person's world to necessitate stepping back in order to survey the bigger picture and keep things on track.

I believe the concept of a "daily review" is so prevalent for two key reasons: people don't trust their system (yet?) and people are not using their system (as effectively?) ... which, as one might expect, leads to the former and then the later and so forth (i.e. it is a self-fulfilling process). GTD does take time and a bit of effort to ensure that the system that one sets up is not too simplistic that things still stay in one's head, yet the system is not too complex that the system becomes its own form of work.

I would take a step and ask the following questions:

What does a daily review mean to you?
Do you need a daily review?
Are you using your system effectively (i.e. do you resist it, dread it, find it tedious, etc.)?
Do you really trust your system?

You will probably find that the issue is that either what you consider as a daily review is far too in-depth and likely unneeded and/or your system probably needs some tweaking to address some of the friction points.

Those are my thoughts at least. Hope it helps :)
 
For me the simplest process would be;

Check calendar
Clear inboxes
Check completed actions and make sure each project that i have acted upon today has an appropriate next action
 
The recommended order of reviewing your system is:
  • Calendar
  • Next action lists
  • Inboxes
Other than that, I don't see the need for a daily review. I have a set of daily reminders that I want to see every day - but that doesn't mean that I have to do those actions, they are just some things I want to be reminded of...
 
Perhaps make a weekly review a certainty, and other reviews as schedule and energy permit it. Also, if you use software like OmniFocus on the mac, you can set the intervals of different projects to different times. There may be some things that you only need to review say monthly, while others are a more daily thing. If you're using a tag based system, you can always have a "@shortlist" tag for longer term items that are susceptible to shorter term completion. If they get carried forward a coupla weeks, get rid of the @shortlist tag (aka "throw'em back").
 
Matt_M said:
This is a common misconception I see regarding GTD: doing a daily review. Personally, I do not recall reading anything about doing a daily review in any of David's books or any of the official GTD materials.
Click to expand...
David writes about what could easily be considered a Daily Review on pages 50 and 192 of Getting Things Done (2015).
 
topshelf said:
David writes about what could easily be considered a Daily Review on pages 50 and 192 of Getting Things Done (2015).
Click to expand...

It comes back to my earlier point in my reply: "it depends on what one means by 'review'". When I re-read the relevant paragraphs on the aforementioned pages, I did not interpret those as a "Daily Review" at all, but I could certainly see how someone would. Rather I interpreted those sections as "using and interacting with your system". Looking at one's calendar, next actions lists, and contexts for a very short period of time (just a few minutes) to decide what to do now given present circumstances seems less like a review and more just like engaging with the system / work. Especially considering that one would do the aforementioned actions several times throughout the course of the day.

Again, it comes back to the fact that "review" is a somewhat overloaded term in GTD as it perhaps had a different meaning in the classic version of GTD than it does in the modern version. As I noted before, probably factoring into the terminology change therein from "Review" to "Reflect". Remember, one of the key points that GTD and the trainers often make is that during a review you should not be doing work. A review is an executive session where you step away from the work and look at the bigger picture across all of the horizons to assess commitments, relevancy of items, and incorporate new data into the system for both the short and long term. Doing this every day does not seem correct or wise as it would become overwhelming and burdensome (much like what the OP seems to be experiencing).

Ultimately, looking at the issue the OP mentioned, it seems like he/she is trying to do a "Weekly Review" (i.e. a proper review) every single day. GTD does not recommend that, unless I have misread the GTD materials.
 
Matt_M said:
This is a common misconception I see regarding GTD: doing a daily review. Personally, I do not recall reading anything about doing a daily review in any of David's books or any of the official GTD materials.
Click to expand...

David Allen mentions that he has a Daily Review checklist in Getting Things Done Fast. However, I wouldn't say its a core part of the framework, more just something a few people benefit from.
 
I do Cal Newport's "Daily Shutdown Routine." This is list of things done at the end of working so that you can leave work behind and focus on non-work. I do it for piece of mind. My daily shutdown ritual looks like Email Zero, Physical inbox zero (or Emergency Scan done to C&O any crucial items in the physical inbox), C&O my "Daily Notes" file, and similar. This takes about 30 minutes, and I literally check them off a list (I have a paper list for this), and do what Newport suggests, which is say out loud the formula (like a magic spell) "Schedule shutdown complete." If anything comes up later, I tell myself, NO! I covered that in my shutdown ritual, and I wouldn't have checked off the boxes and enunciated that magic formula unless I covered that. Then I'm able to let it go. The next day, I often see that I was right and I had it covered, and had a kept worrying about it that would have infected my (very small amount of!) non-work time. Newport discusses this in "Deep Work."

Aloha, Aliman
 
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