GTD Rituals

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garce

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I wanted to check with the experts on what rituals you have established and work for you. I've fallen off the wagon a little but hopping to pick it up in 2021!
I am thinking about events you ritually follow to keep your system moving well. Something like
  1. Daily Review - 15 mins/day
  2. Project Updates??? - assuming planning for your projects take more than the quick 15m/day
  3. Weekly Review - 1 hour/week
  4. Monthly Review - 2 hours/ month
  5. Quarterly Review - 2 hours / quarter
I am specially interested on the project updates (specially breaking things apart, scheduling, find dependencies, estimating, etc -> generate next actions). I find this is what I am not doing properly
 
garce said:
I am specially interested on the project updates (specially breaking things apart, scheduling, find dependencies, estimating, etc -> generate next actions). I find this is what I am not doing properly
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I do very little of this. A bit of scheduling, some making a next action specific, occasionally a dependency, not really any estimating. I think what you are talking about is largely not addressed by GTD. This is not to say that you don’t need to do it, but GTD does not have a heavyweight project planning methodology. The Natural Planning Model is pretty lightweight, by its nature.
 
Thanks for the comment. I know there is the natural planning model but seems that is as far as it goes. Problem is this is fundamental to convert stuff into projects/next actions. I rarely have a clean next action in front of me. Normally multistep
 
garce said:
Daily Review - 15 mins/day
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My daily review is actually about half an hour. I look at weather, review my calendar, review all my mext action lists and read what little new sI consume. When I'm done with my coffee I declare the news reading done.

garce said:
Project Updates??? - assuming planning for your projects take more than the quick 15m/day
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Most of my work has pretty well defined steps, can be planned days/weeks/months and even sometimes years in advance so I try to do the natural planning model on the projects when I decide to add one to my system. How much I go into with it depends. Some projects are very fluid and all I do is put the next action down and maybe an outcome. I don't do project planning every day, only when I add a new project or discover that my planning was inadequate either while working the project actions or at the weekly review.
garce said:
Monthly Review - 2 hours/ month
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I don't do a monthly review other than the standard archiving of calendar items and email messages from 2 years ago in the same month. That way I keep a rolling set of my most current stuff but have my archives to refer back to as I need them.
garce said:
Quarterly Review - 2 hours / quarter
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This is a big one for me and I spend a LOT more time on it than 2 hours. Typically I do my quarterly reviews starting on the equinox and solstices and I expect it to take about a week to week and a half spending at least an hour or 2 each day to get it all done. I swap entire sets of stuff out of my active project task manager system and into someday/maybe and make active a whole new set based on the season and what I can do. I have incorporated elements of a personal retreat, time to just think abuout higher levels, my areas of focus, guided questions to get me exploring where I am now and where I want to go. I have also included stuff from the 12 week year book about setting goals, leading and lagging indicators of progress, what I plan to focus on and the habits and tasks I will need to do to get it done. I do journals, write on some templates that I've found helpful, do the current version of a set of standard questions, review past quarters and in general clean my entire system to get ready for the next season. I've found that when I get ready to put a project back into someday maybe if I take the time to clean all the related files up then it's eaasier to get it going again when its season comes round next year. That includes both paper and digital files.

My winter solstice review which I am doing now also includes a lot of year end tasks, scanning and archiving past year papers that I no longer need in active storage, cleaning my hard drives and computer files. checking that my current backup strategy is god. Chaning passswords on critical places. Starting to gather tax items etc. Those things are all projects in their own right but they feed into the review because I see how I did last year and what I want tochange for this year. I try to select my focus word for the coming year before the 1st and usually write a few entries in my journal about the importance of my word and how I plan to incorporate whatever it means to me in the coming year.
 
Simplicity always wins... if you give yourself too much, it's just a matter of time before you quit. KEEP IT SIMPLE.

-I plan my days the night before (~15 minutes)
-I use an open/close checklist that I run through at the start and end of my day. (~ 20 minutes each)
-Weekly Review is the most important by far (~1-2 hours depending on what's going on)... I've done very long reviews with tons of steps, and very fast ones, but it's highly individualized. Do whatever you need to do to have a grasp on everything going on. A written weekly plan saves TONS of time throughout the week. This is also where I look at projects.
-I never miss a weekly, so that makes my monthly pretty easy (~30m - 1 hour) . I generally just run through and make sure everything is up to date and looks good.
-Quarterly (2 days) -- I do this as an offsite meeting with my company. But I also do a personal one that takes about a 1/2 day.

Again, don't overwhelm yourself by trying to be perfect. The most important thing is that you feel current and clear with what's going on.
 
Cpu_Modern said:
Yeah, but if you do a decent review, chances are your to do lists remain simpler.
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haha of course this is true... but overwhelm is real... and if there is too much friction with your weekly, it'll drop... and then everything speed wobbles out of control until you don't even want to look at your lists. So starting simple and easy is the best bet. Then iterate and add as necessary staying aware of creep.
 
garce said:
Thanks all
Do you schedule any of the rituals on your calendar? I know this is somewhat of a taboo....
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I used to have a repeating 2 hour block on my calendar that I'd move around based on when i could do my weekly review. But i don't do that any more, i used that just a s reminder to stop me from forgetting lol.. now it's a habit. I do have a repeating monthly block, so I can see and set time aside for it. My open/close checklists is the 1st and last part of each of my workdays.
 
garce said:
I wanted to check with the experts on what rituals you have established and work for you. I've fallen off the wagon a little but hopping to pick it up in 2021!
I am thinking about events you ritually follow to keep your system moving well. Something like
  1. Daily Review - 15 mins/day
  2. Project Updates??? - assuming planning for your projects take more than the quick 15m/day
  3. Weekly Review - 1 hour/week
  4. Monthly Review - 2 hours/ month
  5. Quarterly Review - 2 hours / quarter
I am specially interested on the project updates (specially breaking things apart, scheduling, find dependencies, estimating, etc -> generate next actions). I find this is what I am not doing properly
Click to expand...
Same here, want to get back on track. I used to have a lifestyle where I had the time, energy, and focus for all the 5 steps, which worked like a charm, but it changed a lot in the second half of the previous year. Now to organize my calendar events and to get to the right place at the right time is basically 90% of my life (working as a service guy - or something like that).
This year I'd like to do a renovation and redesign of my house so I need to balance these two completely different lifestyles- running an unpredictable task-flow and having a well-designed and managed project. Glad you raised this topic.
My question though: I know the weekly review is a MUST for a GTD system. Does anyone have experience if a biweekly review (or if jobs allows, occasionally a weekly) works on the long run? Even if it takes longer time to process everything.
 
Bertalan Foris said:
My question though: I know the weekly review is a MUST for a GTD system. Does anyone have experience if a biweekly review (or if jobs allows, occasionally a weekly) works on the long run? Even if it takes longer time to process everything.
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Have you considered instead reducing the workload of the weekly review? For example, if you review every project and every Someday/Maybe in your review, maybe you could shift a lot of the Someday/Maybes to a less frequent review schedule. And maybe more projects could be shifted to Someday/Maybe.
 
garce said:
Thanks all
Do you schedule any of the rituals on your calendar? I know this is somewhat of a taboo...
Click to expand...
It’s not taboo at all! It’s just that if you schedule it, you’re committing to do it at that time, and shouldn’t allow anything else to override it.
 
garce said:
Thanks all
Do you schedule any of the rituals on your calendar? I know this is somewhat of a taboo....
Click to expand...
It is NOT a taboo! You do what works for you. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with blocking time on your calendar for important events to you, including daily/weekly rituals.
 
This is an excellent topic. No matter what GTD "ritual(s)" you try, keep in mind this invaluable question from David:

"Can I maintain this easily if I am sick in bed with the flu?"

Besides a custom Weekly Review, I've found a simple Daily Review valuable. For the Daily Review, I recommend looking at pages 50 and 192 from Getting Things Done.
 
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