Weekly Review
by Parker · 36 things on Twos
- The One-Touch Guide to Doing a Weekly Review: How I Go From Chaos to Clarity in 30 Minutes
- https://fortelabs.com/blog/the-one-touch-guide-to-doing-a-weekly-review/
- Productivity guru David Allen calls a weekly review the “master key” to personal productivity
- You want it to be a short, quick, and easy habit that you’ll look forward to completing
- Your Weekly Review should be a quick check-in to give you clarity for the coming week
- Your Weekly Review should accomplish three things:
- Clear your digital workspaces
- Tidy up the virtual environment where you get things done
- Update your available tasks
- Update your to-do’s based on new information that’s come in
- Decide on your priorities for the week
- Select a subset of to-do’s that you are actively committing to for this week
- 5-point checklist:
- Email: emails from other people
- Calendar: calls and meetings at specific times
- Desktop/Downloads: files and downloads
- Notes: digital notes I’ve saved
- Tasks: my to do’s
- "I keep it in a digital “sticky note” in the corner of my computer screen, so I can reference it anytime"
- Exact same steps, in the exact same order
- Take me from total chaos to total clarity about my priorities for the week in 30 minutes flat
- I can’t shut myself off from the outside world if I don’t have the confidence that anything new will be reliably captured somewhere
- My own mind will interrupt me if I’m not certain that I’ll be able to come back and catch up on it all
- Scans calendar from two weeks into the past looking for follow-ups: thank yous, follow-ups, tasks, etc.
- Scan my calendar about four weeks into the future looking for meetings to prepare for, important dates like birthdays and anniversaries, or decisions
- I just copy the link to the note right into the task
- What the next action is: make sure the task is as clear as possible
- What priority it is: apply a tag for High or Medium priority (if it’s low priority I don’t apply any tag)
- Only applying the “high priority” tag if it truly must be done this week
- Which project or area it falls into: move it into the most actionable project or area of responsibility
- Choose the tasks that I’m actually committing to this week. I use the “Today list” feature of my task manager
- You need some way of selecting a subset of your total task list to focus on
- Our systems tend to collapse at the moment of maximum stress
- “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” - Gustav Flaubert
- Weekly review checklist