Build time to plan. Increase your productivity.
Are you really busy and productive at work, jumping from one emergency to the next, but find you still don’t make any progress the projects that will make you successful? Fixing problems can be an adrenaline rush which gives a feeling of accomplishment because of how much /work/ you have done in a day. However, we often sacrifice our precious time to other peoples’ emergencies instead of making progress on the essential things that will help us succeed but are less urgent. A weekly review will help to keep you on track.
Weekly Review
A weekly review is a process of making some consistent, scheduled time to review all of your current projects and to-do lists and evaluate your priorities. A review helps you to determine the next actions to take to progress on your goals. It also keeps you focused on your most important tasks, which often get pushed to one side when problems and other peoples agendas get in the way. A review is not a time to perform tasks even when you realize you have missed something. It is a short, personal, strategic retreat where you can think about the big picture and make sure that you build adequate time, focus and attention for your priorities and make sure you have an appropriate action item for each task.
The idea of a weekly review is a crucial part of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology developed by David Allen. The premise of GTD is that you collect all of your thoughts, define them as actionable tasks and put them into a trusted system for you to track and accomplish. You periodically review this trusted system to stay productive and avoid missing any critical activities. Whether you follow the GTD system or not, I am sure you will agree that having some method for keeping track of the things you need to and want to do will help you achieve success. Without a task management system, you are at the mercy of the many requests for your time that dominate many organizations today.
Schedule a weekly review
Scheduling a weekly review allows you to go through your list of outstanding goals, tasks and action items, evaluate the importance of each, reassess your progress, and determine an action plan for the upcoming week. I believe the best times for a review, assuming you work a standard Monday to Friday schedule, are the last hour of your Friday workday or, even better, an hour on Sunday. A review should take an hour, at most. You may combine a review with extra time for strategic thinking about future goals and projects as long as the process doesn’t become a burden. I feel that Sundays are the ideal time for a review, as you are usually away from the hustle and bustle of office work and have had some physical and emotional distance from the previous week’s activities. However, scheduling time on Sunday may be difficult for some people with family obligations. A Friday afternoon is probably better if you cannot commit to a time block on Sunday. Consistency is better than perfection.
The process for a useful review
- Put all of your outstanding items (called open loops in GTD parlance) into your trusted system/task manager.
- Define the next action for every outstanding task.
- Schedule / attach due dates to your important and time-sensitive action items.
- Review outstanding action items from your prior week. What do you still need to do? Reschedule those items. Remove completed items from your task manager.
- Review all other tasks and projects. Schedule any things that are now actionable.
- Reschedule any overdue tasks.//
It would be best if you began a weekly review with a look at all of the new, incoming tasks and ideas that have risen during the week since the last review. Capture these into your trusted system (whether that is a notebook, a dedicated task manager such as OmniFocus, or a more simple digital task list such as Outlook). Define the next action item for each task. Avoid the temptation to jump into doing any of the functions - this weekly review time is only to collect data and define the action items, not to do them. I recommend scheduling and attaching due dates to action items as it breaks up an extensive list of things you need to do into an actionable schedule that you can complete in the upcoming week.
Once your incoming items are defined and scheduled as action items, review the outstanding tasks from the previous week. What had you wanted to get done last week but didn’t? What can you eliminate from your list - either completed or no longer important? Take a moment to feel pride in your accomplishments - it will provide ongoing motivation for continuing the process. Review all of your goals and related action items. Are they still important? Should they be scheduled in the upcoming week? Are you making progress on the important but not urgent items? Make sure to prioritize the things that need to be done to generate world-class results and schedule them into your upcoming week.
Conclusion
We all have stalled long-term projects and dreams that could make a profound difference in our lives. Whether this is a work project, a networking follow-up, or reading a technical article to increase your professional knowledge, the urgent things always seem most important and the less-urgently tasks that you should be doing get overlooked. Consistently schedule and take the time for a weekly review and you will be amazed at the progress you will make in achieving what is important to you and not just putting out other peoples fires.