review or not to review?

[helenjc]

Have 'fallen off the GTD wagon' myself fairly big time over the last 3-4 months. Combination of circumstances - death in immediate family, hospitalisation and now just returned from a restorative but long (4 week) holiday in New Zealand. A lot of piles, open loops and new projects need to be sorted. In tray is collapsing under the weight.

I want to do my reviews on fridays - in the morning so I can have the afternoon 'off'. It is friday morning now, but what do I do? Do I spend time processing instead of doing the review or do I do the review as best I can by reviewing my lists at least and then start to attack some of the piles which I know have a few criticals in there.

I used to find that if I fell behind in the past that due to the nature of gtd and it's setup it didn't take too long to get things back in order but this time I'm overwhelmed by the 'chaos'.

Any ideas/contributions gratefully accepted!!
Happy Chinese New Year by the way!!

Helen

 

[cris]

If I were you I would process and organize first.
If it's overwhelming then do part of the job and take a break.
You could do a review and update projects and next actions first (some may be done, I would think), but I find the task which most relieves anxiety to be processing the inbox. Sorry to answer Friday evening.

Cris

 

[AMS]

I second the previous post. I would think it would be difficult to review effectively when you haven't collected and processed everything you need to review.