The GTD Weekly Review® will cost you time. So does anything worthwhile. Do it anyway.

The key to personal clarity and focus

I followed up with an executive client a while ago whose biggest issue was that his Weekly Review, when he “really did it right”, sometimes took 3-4 hours. He wondered if he was doing something wrong. I asked if it was worthwhile doing the review, and he admitted that it was critical to stay on top; but that it was “work” to keep it up. It didn’t seem to be saving him time.

The truth is, it probably won’t save you more time--well, it will, but you will need that extra time to do the reviews and keep lists and categories of items current. Yes, you can get better and faster at how you do it. But it requires investment, no matter how good you are at it. As a matter of fact, the less you have time to do it, the more time you usually need to spend with it! There have been times in my life when I had to do some version of a thorough review of my projects and actions daily, not weekly.

The absolute requirement for processing time for knowledge work has been a reality for all of us. But again I must get up on the rooftop and yell at my loudest: “Review all your stuff, and keep it current!” The processing time that serious knowledge work demands is a reality none of us can escape. So let me get back up on the rooftop and shout it again at my loudest: review all your stuff, and keep it current!

No personal management system can possibly come close to creating the perfect algorithm that will tie in all the factors of time, people, projects, actions, and support information with the infinite number of variables that go into our thinking about priorities, interests, and commitments.

That’s why it becomes critical, once these are somehow objectified into an external system, that they be put in front of our conscious thinking process at least once a week, to get it all recalibrated to match our reality. And I guarantee that there are some intuitive “aha’s” and “I could’s” and “I ought to’s” lying dormant, only to be triggered by putting reminders and triggers about all the aspects of our life and work in front of our face on a regular basis. That could be daily, weekly, monthly, depending on the complexity of your life at the moment.

For those of you have bought into my GTD best practices – the degree to which you’ve leveraged its value is almost certainly proportional to how consistently you’ve reviewed and updated your own “ten acres” of personally managed “stuff”.

If you haven’t done it within the last few days, stop internet surfing and do it now!!!!

An hour of effective, precise, hard, disciplined - and integrated thinking can be worth a month of hard work. Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in business and in life. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work... while others party. If you’re not consciously aware of putting forth the effort to exert self-guided integrated thinking... if you don’t act beyond your feelings and you take the path of least resistance, then you’re giving in to laziness and no longer control your life.

-- David Kekich