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Foreign hi everyone. Welcome to our webinar on a guided GTD weekly review. This is your chance to go through what David Allen has called the critical success factor for success with with gtd. It's interestingly, it's the one thing that people say they feel feel the best when they do. And yet it's the thing that people also say they often put off doing or don't feel they have time to do. So I've always felt that there was a lot of value in it or people wouldn't avoid it as much as they do. So we're going to kind of demystify it today and give you a chance to experience the whole review and and be able to say I did it, I did it so that there's no longer some obstacle in front of you that says, oh, I've never really done a weekly review. You'll be able to say by the end of this that you have done a full weekly review. So for my education in the chat, would you say yes or no? I've done a weekly review before. Doesn't mean you've done one every week. I've done one ever in my life. A weekly review. Okay, good. Next, about how long has it been since you did one again? Any answer is fine. You can say I haven't done one for two years or I did one two days ago. Whatever you write is fine. I'm just curious where people are landing on this. About a week last Friday arrange there. Yeah, a few weeks ago. Okay. Ideally what we like to do is get to the point where we we practice it enough that it the it becomes an easier thing to do so that it's easy to do every week, every 10 days, whatever for you weekly is and that may vary depending on what your work schedule is, what else you have going on. If you are just coming back from a summer vacation, a weekly review could be something you have you haven't done for three weeks or could be you did one less than a week ago. The weekly is is just a kind of a basic idea based on a 7 day week calendar week and a 5 day ish work week. And that's different for everybody. Especially in the last few years scheduled are are different and where you're working and when you're working may be different. So because flexible with yourself on that. So the slide here says have nearby a capture tool, access to your lists of projects, next actions etc. Your calendar and ideally any kind of physical tray or inbox that you use as well. Here's our agenda. Three things we're going to point out that it's the critical success factor we already touched on that it's. It's sort of a secret sauce that if you do it regularly, you find out that the rest of your GTD system just holds together better. And that's a hard thing to get across until someone has the experience of it. Once someone has the experience, they go, ah, now I get it. It's one of those things that's hard to explain as a theory, but once you try it, you'll find out. Then we're going to go through the weekly review. We'll do all 11 of the steps of the weekly review and then we'll do a little bit of questions and best practices so you'll have a chance to ask questions including anything that you find is an obstacle to doing it up to now or what showed up for you, as we do at this time. See. Then we'll just do a quick conclusion and look at some next steps for you. Learning Objectives it's really simple here. The the objective is to have you do a weekly review so that either you get one that's recently under your belt, always good, or you do one of the first ones or one more recently than you have done one. So you get that kind of refreshed sense about your system. And here's our our list of the items that go in the GTD workflow Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect and Engage. The one we're going to do today is the weekly review which sits in the reflect section. This is the time to take a step back from your system and your your day to day operations of your life and think about your system. Not get in there and necessarily do what's in your system. So we're going to work on the reflect step today. A couple of purposes for this keeps your system up to date. Often often friction shows up or people find that the system doesn't work as well because it's not current. So this gets it. Current gives you a higher perspective. You've probably heard the expression hugging trees instead of managing the forest. This gives you a chance to get up there and manage the forest more than down there hugging the trees. There are lots of expressions for that. Caught in the weeds, hugging the trees, down in the nitty gritty, things like this. This gives you the higher perspective of your overall inventory of of what you're committed to in your life. It also gives an integrated view. You get a chance to to see more than just the the very fine calendar view. Next actions view you get a chance to look back and go, all right, what's the larger view? What's the longer view? You get a combination of the vertical and the horizontal views of your system and can reassess your various commitments. Maybe some of what you're committing to changes as a result of this. It's all very fluid. Any reviewing is better than none at all. Don't let yourself keep from getting back in the game because you don't feel like you're doing it 100%. This is David Allen's quote to encourage us not to hold some kind of a perfection standard about the weekly review. Truly, any reviewing is better than none at all. By the end of this, you may look back and go, well, I spent more time on one step than the other because that's the one I felt had more. More value for me was better leverage for me. Totally understand that. As we get to these things, I'm going to mention a couple of them that I find really helpful. For me, if I'm, if I'm really short on time and just need to spend five or 10 minutes reviewing something, here's what I do. So we're going to look at that. And the idea is don't hold yourself back, don't hold a standard. Kind of like if you're going to the gym, don't say, well, I have to go to the gym and work out intensively for an hour and a half or it doesn't count. So I'm just going to stay here on the couch with my package of Twinkies or whatever your preferred couch food is. So any reviewing, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, anything is better than none at all. Next we have this fun slide showing what lots of people might consider to be an ideal vacation scene. And whether you think a hammock is comfortable or not, the idea here is you get to have the world be put on hold for a while. And most people feel best about their system when they are about to go on vacation, like getting ready to get on board the plane or something like that. And the reason is that they've put a lot of effort, usually a lot of effort in that last few days into completing things, renegotiating commitments, reviewing what's coming up, pushing things off into the future that were coming up. They, they've, they've done essentially a weekly review and gotten their system in a place where they can go on vacation. Our suggestion is just to do that regularly so you get that pre vacation feel at least every week or so instead of just every year or twice a year. However, often you go to visit palm trees or ski or do whatever you do when you go on vac so you can have that feeling more often. And the Weekly Review is the way to do it. I just put a link in the chat to the Tools and Templates page of the Document library in GTD Connect. If you don't have it handy, at the top of that page there is what's called the Methodology Guides PDF. You can open that PDF and you'll find the Weekly Review template that shows these steps for the weekly Review. That way you don't need to hold on to the memory of this slide. You can have it open as a PDF in front of you just by using that link to get to the Methodology guides in the Connect Document Library. So you'll notice that there are three sections here. Get Clear, Get Current, Get Creative. And within those three sections there are a couple of steps in each one. Most of them the Get Current section. So we're going to go through all three of those. We're going to get clear in the first one by collecting your loose papers and materials, getting your in to zero, emptying your head. Then we're going to go through Get Current by reviewing your various lists. Finally, we'll have some time to get creative, which you will have earned by doing the other two sections and Getting clear and current. So your turn. We're going to complete a weekly review step by step. I'm going to give you time to work on each of these steps as we go through them and I'll be mostly quiet during that time. I may have a couple of prompts or things for you to consider, but mostly this is going to be a very you focused time. This is for you to get a chance to get into your system and hopefully get a different perspective on it. Ideally you've got your door closed or a sign up that says do not disturb. And you've done this at a time where you can turn off other notifications and not have to pay attention to anything else. So our first one is Get Clear. In Get Clear is the Collect loose papers and materials. Pull out your wallet, your handbag, your briefcase, your knapsack, all those things. Pull out anything like business cards, receipts, paper based materials that you've collected and put those in an in tray. If you don't have an in tray on your desk or your work area, that's okay. Designate an area. It could be the size of a piece of paper, a corner of your desk, something like that. Designate an area to call it Your in area and just make a pile of your accumulated paper stuff like that from your wallet, purse, briefcase, etc. That's anything that doesn't belong in your wallet, purse, briefcase. For the longer term, if it's in there temporarily and you're only holding it for a bit, pull it out so you can process that and go ahead and do that. Take a couple of minutes to do it. If you want to get really adventurous and your car is nearby, go out and look in your glove compartment and the, the door compartments in your car, the center console between the seats, see what all has collected there that you need to process or do something about. And give you two, three minutes to do that and go, we're back again. Next up, we're going to move on to. There we go. Getting into zero. This is a step that can hold people back a bit if they don't regularly get their ends to zero. This one can take longer and then it becomes a well, I can't do the weekly review because getting into zero ends up taking me a day. So I never get finished with the weekly review. So we're going to get started getting into zero. Depending on how long it's been since you got to the bottom of your inboxes, you may or may not get there this time, but we are going to at least touch in on this step and give you the chance to experience what it's like to, to work on getting into Xero. So you can start with a digital or a paper inbox. You may want to start with that set of papers that you put in your inbox or your in area, clarifying receipts, business cards, what you need to do with anything like that. Or you may want to go directly to a digital inbox that has more stuff in it. With the digital especially, you may want to consider, depending on how much you have in there, archiving instead of having to process every single item. So let me pause here a moment and ask you, do you have a couple of dozen things in in, not very many things in in. Or are you one of those people who may not have gotten your into zero very recently? And you could have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of things in and in that you consider still to be processed. So again, any answer is okay, well, we want to, we want to assess current reality here. Few dozen. Work is zeroed every day. Personal has a few hundred. Okay, yeah, that's actually, that's what we hear often from people is that the, the personal stuff tends to take a bit of a back seat to work that that seems to be the way it works for a lot of people, a couple in both work and personal. Some are lurking in my AT Action and waiting for folders. Good. We're going to get to looking at those in a few minutes for whichever in you start. Let's let's work on clarifying that in here's where. Here's where you may have a chance to improve your GTD practice. And that and the opportunity here is we are just clarifying and getting things organized into your system. We're not getting into the doing unless the item is clearly less than two minutes to complete. So you want to be careful you don't get down some rabbit trail of doing something that's going to take you five or 10 minutes, because then you're working on that and not getting to clarifying the rest of your stuff. So here's the clarifying diagram you may already be familiar with. For each item, ask what is it? That's usually pretty straightforward. Answer. Next, is it actionable? Then you go no or yes. If it's a no, it goes into trash, reference, or incubation. Trash and reference are pretty obvious. Incubation is something like a someday maybe list where you say, I'm not committing to do this, I'm just going to put it on a someday maybe I'll do it list that you review at some point in the future. Incubate could also be I'm not ready to decide now, but I'm going to put it on my calendar to consider deciding about later. Could be something like you hear about concert tickets or tickets to a theater play or some other event. You're not sure you want to go, so you put that on your calendar to decide a week from now or whenever you consider the the it starts getting ripe enough that you need to decide by then. You can incubate it to the future that way. On the other hand, if you say yes, this is actionable now, then you have a few choices there. Can you do it in less than two actions? Sorry, less than two minutes. If yes, go ahead and do it right then and there. And as time goes by, you'll get better. Deciding what's really two minutes and what's not in the beginning, you may want to time yourself on those. If it can't be done in less than two minutes, can you delegate it? Great. Delegate more and more as as you can. If you can't delegate it or do it in less than two minutes, then it's defer. It means it goes on your list of next actions that you'll do as soon as you can, but not right away, not, not at least in this moment. So that's your list of next actions. And then after you've put it there, the, the last question you ask is number five there in the center. Is there a project? Would completing that action get this off your mind or is there still something left to do? If so, there's a project and you would put that on your projects list. At that point you'd have a project and a next action to match it. So I'll give you more like seven minutes here to start going through one of your inboxes, if not several of them, to process things like that. So here you go. Time for you to clarify what's in your in watch that temptation to get into doing something that takes longer than two minutes. The idea here is to get that feeling of ah, I got closer to zero or I reached zero. That's the goal here, not the, not the doing of things. This is a good time to watch whether you have slipped a bit into the doing something that turned out it took more than two minutes. So this is, this is a great time to be calibrating your your sense of how long two minutes is. If you find yourself launching into something that you thought was two minutes and it turned out to be longer, this is a great time to go. Oh, okay, now I know when I look at something it and I think it's two minutes or less, it's often two minutes or more. So it helps to kind of know your your own sense of timing that way. And the more you can re stick with reviewing instead of doing, the more you'll get into the weekly review habit. Couple minutes more on the processing your ins and out, then we'll move on. For your reference, this clarifying diagram is also in the methodology guides I especially for anyone who's new or kind of refreshing the GTD practice, I highly recommend having the clarifying diagram handy when you're processing your inboxes. It's so useful to discipline yourself with the clarifying diagram to go through the what is it? Is it actionable? If yes, if no and it it just simplifies things and it ends up producing better quality lists. Some of you have heard me harp on this in other webinars how I think that the quality of your lists is improved greatly by time you spend on clarifying. That's quality time where you really slow down enough to say is it really actionable? If yes, what is the next action Slowing down on this Step will create these quality lists that make it easy to engage later or easier to review too. So next up we're going to go to emptying your head. In other words, a mind sweep. So we're going to take four minutes or so now to put in writing and clarify any uncaptured new projects, action items, waiting fors, someday, maybes, etc. Pull them out of your head, write them down, type them down, tap them down, whatever you need to do to get them objectively out of your head. And just take a couple of minutes now to start saying anything that's on your mind and then we'll process those as well. But for the first part of this, just get them out of there. Whatever pops into your head and including if you think it's already on your lists, there's a reason for that. So couple of minutes to get stuff off your mind and go. And the next part of this is to for to look at each of those items that you've externalized from your mind and treat it as if it's something new in your inbox. So you look at it and say is it actionable? Yes or no. And then you move on to going through it to clarify what happens, whether it's actionable or not, and that kind of thing. So you're, you're clarifying and organizing the results of your mind sweep. So another two minutes to to clarify that. See if you have any new projects or action items that came out of that. And if you haven't completely clarified the stuff that came out of your head, that's okay, just goes in your inbox, your in basket, your in tray, and you'll, you'll clarify it later on. Ideally, after we finish this review, you would either go back to clarifying or set aside some time later today to do more clarifying to get your ends closer to zero. So next up here we're going to look at next actions lists. Two items show up here to look at Markov completed actions. Hooray, yay for you. And also review for reminders, further action steps to record. You may look at something and go yes, that. And now that I think of it, here are two other things or one other thing, something like that. So this is a time for you to look at your next actions lists. For most of you, those are probably organized by category or context. So you might have a list of calls or at computer or any, any context like that. And the contexts could be different now than they were a few years ago. You're at computer list may Be subdivided into four different versions of what you do at your computer. So go through those Next Actions lists. We're going to take eight minutes for that more time on this because it's probably a longer set of lists and you're just looking at each of those items, just reviewing those. And again, be careful of the temptation to start doing those things. What you've got on these lists is not a two minute or less action. You clarified these items already and decided that they were not two minutes or less. So you're not getting into the doing of them now because that would get you into something that'll take longer than two minutes. Just reviewing. Just want to get through putting your eyes on those and having a look at them. So take eight minutes and go. This is also a time when you can improve the quality of your lists, maybe by finding things on there that are. If you find something that was listed on a calls list, but you realize I don't have the person's phone number, then the next step isn't to call. The next step is to get the phone number. So you may want to move that to a different category, different context to get the phone number or get whatever other information you need in order to take the next action. So great time to recategorize to improve the quality of your lists. And again, you may not have gotten through everything. If you have. Again, I'm just throwing out numbers here that may or may not apply to you. If you have 100 or more items on Next actions lists, it could take you a little longer than this to review every single one of them. The idea here is for us to get you a taste of each of those steps, not necessarily go through it completely, which you'll be able to do once. Once you get into doing a weekly review regularly, you'll be able to get all the way through those lists on a regular basis. Next up then we're going to go to calendar. Two sections here on calendar. The first is reviewing your previous calendar data. Look at your past calendar in detail for remaining action items, reference data and transfer it into your active system. The way that could look is you look back and have a find. You had a meeting last week and it occurs to you that you made some commitment to produce information, send information to your team, something like that, and that didn't get into your system. So this is the time to use. Use this as a safety net to get that into your system so that you can follow through on your commitment. Could be as simple as after the last meeting, you haven't scheduled the next meeting to follow up on that. So whatever you need to do your past calendar, you look at it and go what does this remind me that I need to do? So we're going to take a couple of minutes for that and let's see, let's use about three minutes for that and go back anywhere from a week to a month. Whatever feels right to you. You guessed it. The next thing we look at is your upcoming calendar. Two things here. Review upcoming events longer and shorter term and capture any actions that that that prompts you to to add to your your lists. For example, you may look ahead a week or two and see a meeting coming up and realize oh, I need to do some prep for that. There are things I need to do ahead of time. So you may want to add that to a next actions list. If, if it's going to take a bit longer. You may even want to add calendar time for working on that. Block out some time on your calendar so that you can prepare for that meeting and just feel like you you're on top of the situation. Your future isn't coming to overwhelm you. You're riding the wave instead of being swallowed by the wave. So take about two minutes to look at your upcoming calendar and go. Very good. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, there are two things that I like to do if I only have a short amount of time and I want to feel much more on top of things. And those are the reviewing the previous and the upcoming calendar. For me, those have a lot of feel better in a hurry leverage to them. I can feel much more on top of my system just by looking at the last week or two of calendar and the coming week or two of calendar. I often will will do that if I just have a couple of minutes between two other things I'm doing and I just want to feel better overall. I get a quick overview of what's recent past, what's coming up in the near future. Right. Next up we've got. You might have guessed it. Reviewing the waiting for list. Two things could happen here. You could record any actions that you are waiting for that aren't yet on your list. Could be right before this you ordered something online and you want to record that as a waiting for that order to arrive. You may also look at your waiting for list and say hey, I got that already. I can check that off. The other thing on the waiting for list I find is that things move back and forth on this list. For me, it's a waiting For I receive it, then it becomes a next action for me. So something goes on my next actions list which then once I do it, it becomes a waiting for again. So especially for a project, that something might move back and forth between waiting for and next action a couple of times. So take a couple of minutes to review your waiting for list and see if, if anything there is getting, getting to the point where you go, oh, that's, that needs a follow up. I need to ping this person and say, what's up? I was waiting for this. You said you'd have it by now. A couple of minutes and we'll go. Next up we have projects. And I realize this has been a bit of a whirlwind tour of, of your lists and you've very likely not gotten through everything on every list. But again, the idea is just to give you a quick experience of each of the steps so you'll be able to look back and say, oh yeah, at least I touched into every one of the steps of the review and we're going to take a little longer on projects. A couple of things here. For each one you're going to evaluate the status of the project or maybe a goal or a vision or something longer term. For each one, you're going to evaluate the status, ensuring that the, there's at least one current next action on each one. For a project, you don't need to have more than one action, you just need to have at least one next action. And I, I think of that as a, a foothold to get back into the action or a bookmark to open the book back to where it was before and keep moving forward. So it doesn't, it's, it's nothing more than just a way to get back into the project. And often getting back into the project will reveal to you what's next and next and next. So you're also going to look through project plans and support materials that you may have. Any other work in progress, material related to that project that could trigger new actions that you've, you've seen to do or remind you that you can mark something off a list that has already been completed or move something to waiting for various things could show up out of reviewing your projects. So let's take five minutes for a project review and you're off. As we're finishing up that stuff, I will just say, often the question comes up, how many next actions should I list for a project? If it's got threes, eight, dozens of potential next actions should I try to list all of them? No, you don't need to. You can if you want to make sure they're all really next actions. They don't depend on anything else happening first. If something else has to happen first. They are more like project support material or potential next actions. They should not be stored on your next actions list. Your next actions lists should be entirely things that you can do when you're in the right place at the right time with the right tools, not dependent on anything else happening first. So for each project, you want to make sure there's at least one next action that you can use to get back into the project. I like to think of it as a bookmark or something like that that just. It's all I need to do to get back into what I was doing before. And I don't need to know what every page is after that or whatever other step is. I just need to know how to get into the project. For each project, you want to have at least one thing that gives you that kind of leverage. You only need one, but it should be at least one good one like that.