How long should the Weekly Review take?

[KW7]

Mine was almost 3 hours. I'm hoping that I'll get more efficient over time. It is a big stress reliever and I suppose I should think about how time would be wasted if I didn't do such a review but that's still a long time.

 

[Geeko]

There is no actual amount of time that the Weekly Review should take. For example if you were on a business trip during the week and your inbox is piled up sky-high, you will have to process all this during your Weekly Review.

The goal here is actually to get prepared for what is to come during the next week(s). If it takes you three hours to get to that feeling that is totally fine. And it is also a matter of experience. I think once you are familiar with the procedure you can perform the different steps much faster.

Maybe you should ask yourself one question: Do you feel like you wasted these three hours or part of it?
If the answer is yes, you maybe spent some time to think too deep about stuff that was already totally clear to you.

I hope, this helps.

Cheers,
Tristan

 

[vaughan76]

I find that the first ones take a while if I’ve fallen off the wagon. Once I get into a groove they might only last 15-30 minutes, but that’s because I’ve got a lot of things dialed in from doing it regularly.

 

[aderoy]

There are times where I will do more than one 'weekly review', if I am going to be offsite for two or more days I will do a mini review prior. This way I know everything is captured allowing for mind like water, then of course do the full weekly review at the 'normal' day and time.

 

[Bill Myers]

@KW7, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with weekly reviews that take three hours. Getting Things Done doesn't prescribe a minimum or maximum length, although IIRC somewhere in the book it suggests you should expect it to take an hour or so.

My only concern about reviews lasting three hours is what would happen if you're busy and can't devote that much time during a particular week. That might create some resistance to doing the review.

My reviews used to take three or four hours, and so I'd skip them for weeks at a time. Finally I paid attention to which aspects of the review were taking too long (by my standards) and found a way to be more efficient with them.

Since you're interested in similarly streamlining your review, though, I think it would be helpful for us to know what parts of the review are taking the longest. If you're not sure, try timing each phase of the weekly review the next time you do it. If we have more specifics about your challenges we'll be able to give you more useful advice.

 

[Loïs]

Mine take between 2 and 5 hours (mostly because I get distracted by some items), so I wouldn't be worried if I were you: it's a great use of time as it frees up time for the rest of the week.

 

[sholden]

My weekly reviews take 90 minutes. I take a 10 minute break at 40 minutes. I use a countdown timer to keep me on track.

 

[Oogiem]

Mine was almost 3 hours.

Well if it makes you feel any better, this week my review took nearly 6 hours. Just lots of stuff that I needed to catch up on, document progress on, verify status of, a bunch of things that had to go back into someday/maybe, a bunch that had to come out for work on this next week and a lot of calendar catchup and making sure that nothing is going to fall through the cracks now that lambing is commencing.

Sometimes I can breeze through a review in less than an hour and sometimes it takes all day. <shrug> I just do whatever I need to do until I'm happy with my plans going forward.

 

[KW7]

It turns out the Projects are what take most of my time. I inevitably find a piece of one project or another that needs attention -- an email wasn't sent, I didn't get a response to a meeting request, etc. --- and reviewing current tasks, creating new ones, and making other adjustments takes longer than simply looking at a task and asking the "next action" question. I may have too many projects too. I'm not ready to declare that officially though since I've only been "on the GTD wagon" for a few weeks. It does feel really good to retire a project once all the steps are done though. Woohoo!