Help, I'm resisting my review

W

wordsman

0
I keep procrastinating over my weekly review. I've always done a review, always resisted doing it, but always felt much better for completing it. Does anyone have any tips or insight here?

It's obviously easier to just do what comes in, or what's top of mind, so I think that's what I tend to do. But that's not GTD. And I'm sitting here at 4pm GMT having tried to knuckle down since 9am, and I'm only half way through. The studpid thing is I have a deadline for tomorrow, and not doing my review has been stopping me getting on with that work.

thanks :?
 
How long does your review take, anyway?

I just knocked mine off in about 30 minutes. While sometimes it takes longer than that, I'm just astounded by people who say that they need an entire day for it. If that's the case, *of course* you'll resist doing it.

A few tips:
* Keep your inbox under control. If you have to spend three hours clearing your inbox before you even start the review, you're asking for trouble. Ideally, your inboxes (ALL of them) should be empty at least once per day.

* Let other priorities take priority when necessary. I'll often delay my weekly review if I have an immediate deadline: the deadline defines what I'll be doing for the next day or two anyway, and once it's over doing the review lets me indulge my natural tendency to want to clear the decks for the next thing.

* Keep your project list under control. Make full use of the Someday/Maybe list. If there's something that you know you aren't going to act on until next January, there's no reason why you should review it every week.

* If you get overwhelmed, stop. Figure out why the system isn't working, and fix it. The Weekly Review is both the key to GTD, and the single most time-consuming element of GTD. If your Weekly Review is not working, your whole system is in danger of collapse. Don't ignore the danger signs.

Good luck!

Katherine
 
Getting down to 30 mins would be amazing Katherine. I recon a couple of hours is the norm. Today I've been doing bits of work and taking calls in between. I've been saying to myself 'right, now I'm going to blast through the review and not stop till I've finished'. But to no avail. This is with having cleared my emails last night in readiness (I've always kept a pretty clear inbox). hmmm.
 
I used to resist Weekly Reviews because they took so long. I finally realized they took so long because I turned them into the Weekly "Do and Review and Do". Once I restricted things to simply "collecting, processing, organizing and reviewing" I went from 3hrs to 30 minutes.
 
The purpose of the weekly review is to keep your system up to date and functional. In essence, my weekly review is just making sure that everything is captured and in their proper placeholders, and that goals, projects, and next actions tie-in. If you’re consistent with daily collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing, the weekly review, IMO, is more of “stop and think” than catch up.

Projects relegated to someday/maybe still have to be reviewed weekly, but the review is much simpler. You only need to decide whether you want to activate the projects, or keep them incubated. So I agree you should make full use of the someday/maybe list. It’ll speed up your weekly review.

If you still find yourself resisting the weekly review, you might want to look up the topic about “cringing.” There might be some tasks on your lists that make you “cringe” a bit, causing you to procrastinate over your weekly review. Or maybe the deadline for tomorrow is the one you’re procrastinating over, and you’re simply using the weekly review as an excuse for not doing what you’re supposed to do. That’s only my take on it. You have to dig deep enough yourself to uncover the reasons why you’re resisting something as valuable as the weekly review.

“Very simply, the weekly review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again.” – DA
 
Also, what time are you doing your reviews? I've found that I'm much better at getting it done on Sunday mornings instead of Friday afternoons.
 
remyc88;43032 said:
Also, what time are you doing your reviews? I've found that I'm much better at getting it done on Sunday mornings instead of Friday afternoons.
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I used to do them at nights, but found out that mornings are better for me, as my thinking is much more realistic/down to earth. (While when doing nightly reviews I used to put up some pretty wild dream stuff type of tasks on my list.)

And yeah, Sunday's work way better for me than Friday's.
 
Agreed with notmuch. wordsman, are you doing any work as part of your Review?

During the Weekly Review, do no work. Make no phone calls. Send no e-mails. Only change the contents of your Projects, Actions, and Someday/Maybe lists.
 
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