Weekly review and project materials

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syrex314

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I've been GTDing since 2009, and I think I've finally established the habit of doing weekly rewiews. I'm up to 16 weeks in a row, and I plan to keep up with it!

One question I have though-- does anyone here really go through their project support materials each week? If I'm to avoid spending an entire day on my weekly review, all I have time for is a quick check that each project has an action item. Any thoughts?
 
Well, there's project support material and there's project support material. In other
words, (in theory at least), I can have a pile of papers that I may want to riffle through
while working on a project, and I can also have one single sheet of paper with the
lists of the main steps on the project, that I can quickly read over when reviewing,
check off what's done, and get a feel for how far along I am in the project. And
possibly a mind-map about the project, to glance at. One can also limit the number
of projects that are considered active that week.

Single-actions (things too small to be projects) don't need that kind of review.
 
syrex314;108360 said:
One question I have though-- does anyone here really go through their project support materials each week?
Click to expand...

I generally do for all active projects. At least I grab the folder if it's physical, or look in the electronic folder and see if there is anything I need to toss or file into reference and also whether there are any lurking actions or new projects buried in my notes.
 
I review some, but I should do more.

When reviewing my project list, if I feel the project is humming along I won't always look at the support material. Which, frankly, is pretty lazy of me since 99% of my stuff is digital and it's simply a matter of clicking an icon in OmniFocus (custom applescript to open project smart folder).
 
I don't have to review all my project support material during a weekly review, but I do need to decide or have decided what support material needs to be reviewed. Sometimes a weekly review generates a next action like "review state of project X".
 
Large Projects Could Take Hours This Way

If you committed to reviewing all of the project support material for every project during your weekly review and you had say ten projects it could easily take five hours or more at thirty minutes per project folder. Somehow I don't think that level of detail could be necessary for every weekly review.

Am I missing something?

Michael
 
I will rarely go through all my support material, but the review will nudge me into action to make an action to check things in more detail if I have been working on a project during the week and need to revisit for further actions. I find that running through the list of projects is enough to remind me. I think this is one of the keys of the review being truly weekly - if I tried to do this once every 3 weeks I would be less confident in my ability to remember items when "nudged" by the list.
 
My project support is in OneNote, and you can tag items. So I have setup a tag each for Review Weekly, Review Monthly, Review 6 Monthly. Everything gets reviewed once a year.
So I can customise how often I see things, but only a small proportion would be reviewed weekly.
 
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