Weekly Reviews in two places

C

Conejo23

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I searched the forum archives to see if this had come up, probably has, but I'm not seeing anything. My apologies if I'm asking something that has been repeatedly addressed.

I have 2 small businesses, one where we actually have a physical office I go to every day and where I spend the majority of my weekday time. Then we also have a smaller home-based business, and then of course there’s just the act of living and having a home, which creates a ton of stuff to process.

So, how do you guys handle weekly reviews in such an environment? Not everyone is going to have an at-work and an at-home business, but I'm guessing most people here have some kind of job or thing they do during the day outside of the house, and then you have where you live, so this situation does not appear all that unique to me.

I realized that in my prior attempts to practice GTD I was not giving sufficient attention and energy to the review process and I'm committed to not making that same mistake. I just read David’s free article on the weekly review, which is great. He details step by step what he physically does in his review. I’ve created that recurring weekly task for myself in OmniFocus and in the notes section I've outlined everything he does and I'm going to start by following that model. But then I realized I can do it at work but what about home? Seems like I really need to have two different weekly reviews. So for now, I've made my at-work review scheduled for Thursday late afternoon (can’t ever do it during the meat of the day, I work with clients all day), and the at-home one for Sunday morning.

Just wondering if anyone else has run into this and found a leaner or more elegant approach to this issue.
 
Hi Conejo23

It's very common for people to have two versions of the Weekly Review: the one done at work and the one done at home.

I do mine all in one sitting in one location, but many people will break it up.
 
The point of a weekly review is that every part of the system gets a once-over at least once a week. There is no reason that every part must be looked at on the same day of the week; in fact, most of my clients really struggled to find a chunk of time they could devote solely to a Weekly Review and have found it easier to break it up across days.

For example, you may review your physical inbox on Monday, your email inbox on Tuesday, and your wallet and refrigerator door on Wednesday. Everything gets touched once or more each week, but you're not bogged down with a huge Weekly Review task.

So, you may want to do your at-work review on a separate day as your at-home review, or even break it down further and review at-work email on Monday, at-work physical inbox on Tuesday, at-home email on Wednesday, etc.
 
You have a choice

Surely you can do 2 reviews, and it's useful if they demand for the same time, energy and intensity.

On the other side, probably you have 2 systems, with same rules but different quantity of data involved in it. In this case you could create a portable system for the small one, doing only 1 review in one place for your two systems.

In this last case, you can do a 1 "real" single review, considering your 2 systems as a 1 integrated system, or you can do 2 reviews, repeating every step times, one for each system.

Your choice.
 
to clarify, I don’t have two systems, I have one. I don’t know how people would manage with two systems, it’s takes enough effort just to maintain one.

I want to look to ONE place and see all my tasks, whether they’re for business 1, business 2, or are personally related.

I do like the idea above of giving myself permission to take several days to complete a full review cycle. But at this point I think my best bet is to consider home and office reviews as separate and discrete tasks that all feed into a unified system.
 
Conejo23;74165 said:
to clarify, I don’t have two systems, I have one. I don’t know how people would manage with two systems, it’s takes enough effort just to maintain one.

I want to look to ONE place and see all my tasks, whether they’re for business 1, business 2, or are personally related.
Click to expand...

Well, then you'll need a software program or a spiral binder that you can use in both your office and your home. (You can use a service like Dropbox to create a shared folder on multiple computers where you save the settings files for task management apps so every computer has perfectly synced data.)

Different businesses would be subdivided via Projects, i.e.:

PROJECT NAME
Business 1: Hire Secretary
Business 1: Estimate Cost of Bigger Office Space
Business 2: Get Quotes on New Logo
Business 2: Update Website
Personal: Find Local Bartending Class

Then you use contexts to separate out what *must* be done at the office (@OFFICE) or at home (@HOME). I personally feel people go way overboard with contexts; you shouldn't use an @ANYWHERE or @MISC, and if you're at a computer all day long, then leave the context for computer-related activities blank and instead consider an @OFFLINE context for the considerably-smaller group of tasks you can do without a computer.
 
Thanks Marina, that’s what I'm already doing. I use OmniFocus so all my tasks are integrated into one system/view, my contexts are simple but sufficient and my projects are delineated by business. I have two folders, personal and work, into which all projects go. Then I have a folder under work for Business 1, another for Business 2, and that’s where all the projects go so there’s clear separation.
 
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