So you’re ring-fencing your creativity, avoiding the Sisyphus effect of endless to-do lists and getting all your commitments off your mind and into buckets. So what happens next?
Obviously, there’s no point capturing all those to-do items unless you’re going to do something about them. Which means regularly ‘emptying the buckets’, reviewing your commitments and deciding what to do. How you do this and how often is up to you, but here are a few principles to bear in mind.
Why should you review?
- First, and most obviously, to make sure you actually do the tasks on your to-do lists!
- If you don’t review the lists regularly, you’ll soon stop trusting them and won’t be able to use them to get things off your mind.
- It’s important to set aside time to think about how you’re going to approach your work. It’s tempting to ‘get going’ first thing in the morning, so you feel like you’re getting things done – but whenever I do this, my day is always less productive and more stressful than on days where I take 10 minutes to review my commitments and decide how I’m going to tackle them.
- It helps you step back and see the ‘big picture’ of your work, weigh up priorities and make decisions about your next steps.
- Whenever you review your upcoming work and are confident you can get it all done, it will be a weight of your mind and your energy level will rise. If you review and find that you are not confident of getting it all done, then the review will be even more valuable – better to find out now than later on!
When should you review?
In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen suggests that you review your to-do lists as often as you need to in order to feel on top of things. I do a mini-review every morning when I look through my e-mails and other in-trays (from yesterday of course).
A larger-scale weekly review is one of the cornerstones of the Getting Things Done system. David Allen describes the weekly review as a time to:
- Gather and process all your ‘stuff’
- Review your system
- Update your lists
- Get clean, clear, current and complete
I’ll be honest and say I don’t do the review every week. Some weeks simply feel too busy, other weeks I’m so caught up in what I’m doing that stopping to review seems like an unnecessary interruption. But whenever I do make time for it, I always feel better – the review gives me a clear sense of where I am and what I’m doing. I nearly always find something important that was in danger of slipping through the cracks. After finishing the review, I’m full of renewed enthusiasm for my work. So maybe I’ll do it this week after all…
How should you review?
In his book, David Allen gives detailed instructions on performing a weekly review. But it’s really up to you how you do it – the review is about doing whatever you need so that you feel on top of your work.
Here’s what I usually do:
- Empty all my ‘buckets’ (For a definition of buckets see the previous post, Get things off your mind.)
- Review my diary.
- Review my to-do lists, deleting anything I’ve done or am not going to do.
- Decide on my priorities – which projects do I really want to move forward in the next week? How will I find time for them?
- Backup my computer and blogs.
It’s important to empty your buckets by making sure you have a record of each task in a place where you will find it when you need to. It’s up to you how you manage your to-do lists – you might like to have one big list or several, on paper or in digital format. David Allen suggests you have different lists for different contexts – e.g. a list of phone calls to make by the phone, a separate list of things to do when you’re in town etc.
I use iGTD to manage most of my lists – it’s designed for the Getting Things Done system and allows me to assign tasks to both projects (e.g. ‘Blog ideas’) and contexts (e.g. phone calls or e-mails). When I empty my buckets, I transfer any tasks from meetings, answerphone messages, notes etc. to iGTD. There’s no need to do this for e-mails, as the e-mails themselves serve as reminders of the tasks – I’m not finished until the inbox is empty.
Reading through that last paragraph, I realise how geeky I must sound! Well, I’ll let my friends be the judge of that. The system probably sounds like a lot of work, but I hardly notice it any more. It took a while to get used to this way of working, but now it works so well for me, I take it for granted. Dealing with tasks in this way has almost become automatic, leaving my mind free to think about more interesting things.
On the subject of geekiness, it will probably come as no surprise to learn that Getting Things Done and similar systems can become an obsession with some enthusiasts. If you’re not careful you can spend so long reviewing and tweaking your system that you never get round to actually doing the things on your list… Having said that, I’ve found the time I’ve invested in investigating these systems and changing my working habits has been repaid many times over. I hope this series helps you make your working life more productive, enjoyable and creative – please share your experiences and questions in the comments.
In my final post I’ll point to some useful books, software and websites to help you fine-tune your own personal organisation system.
Questions
- How often do you review your commitments? Daily? Weekly? Never?
- What difference does it make when you make time to review?
- What difference does it make when you’re ‘too busy’ to review?
- How do you review? Any tips you’d like to share?
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