13. On Getting Things Done - Keeping the weekly review under an hour.

After comparing Getting Things Done (GTD) with Scrum the other day, I got sort of inspired to write more about GTD. I'd like to share two revelations I've made about my personal GTD implementation. As I mentioned, I'm (making an attempt at) following David Allens productivity system GTD. My goal state is to follow it "to the book", and I do so to a large degree. And I have to admit. The most difficult habit to form and follow have been to perform the weekly review consistently.

The problems I've been facing, is that doing a review have, to me, been a very costly endeavor.  According to The Book, it should not take more than an hour. I've often found mine to take three. Spending three hours on a sunday afternoon reviewing my work-in-progress is a lot of work - both for me and my family. Even when it leaves me feeling totally in control of my destiny for an hour or five afterwards.

Your basic weekly review checklist looks like this:

1. Collect loose papers and materials
2. Process all inboxes, so they are empty
3. Empty your head (on paper, for example)
4. Review your Next Actions list
5. Review the two previous weeks in your calendar
6. Review the two next weeks in your calendar
7. Review everything you are waiting for
8. Review project lists
9. Review any relevant checklists
10. Review SomedayMaybe
11. Be Creative and courageous

To me, those 10 actions + primer usually added up to much more than one hour of work! Even though, in the periods when I actually did this (without the optimizations I will describe in a second) on a regular basis, it felt like keeping it below an hour and thirty minutes was entirely possible. But still then, dropping the last point - reviewing the contents of the SomedayMaybe list, happened more often than not.

So what did I do then, to fix this?

SomedayMaybe is a bad name

My first observation was over time that I used my SomedayMaybe folder more like a trashcan. I placed things there, and never looked at them again. It grew huge! And for my own part, it was a problem of semantics. SomedayMaybe is, at least to my brain, to similar to the category of things that it would be nice to be able to do, should the universe put it in to my lap - but not otherwise. The intention of SomedayMaybe however is for things that you intend to do, but can't give top priority as of yet. For SomedayMaybe to work, it must be revisited on a regular basis! I needed a name for the category that was closer to "put it of for now, but make sure to read it again later."

I renamed my SomedayMaybe category to Incubate.

After renaming the list, I was more inclined to actually intervene with it. It was half the battle - my Incubate system was working!

There are always too many projects

Reviewing my projects list was another pain-point. It took a very long time during the review. And many of the projects was things I didn't really have intentions to execute on as of just now. They didn't really have a place on the project list at all! Of course, keeping the project list clean is one of the tings one do during the weekly review. And all of those projects should have been moved to the someday-maybe category. But I really had intentions to do them some time - and my someday maybe wasn't working so they stayed on my project list. A Catch 22 of sorts.

I ended up fixing this by adapting a concept from the Kanban process for agile software development: capping Work In Progress(WIP). I arbitrarily set the amount of projects I allowed to have open at any time to 15, and moved one by one over to my Incubate folder to that limit was reached. Reviewing 15 projects I could do in a couple of minutes. In addition, limiting the content of my active projects-list to only 15 projects at a time, really forced me to get my priorities in order. It became a driver to sort out especially what was happening on 30 thousand feet (the short-to-medium-term goals and intentions level.) And then, having my priorities in order enabled me to think clearly and more critical when I reviewed my Incubation lists. So in a sense, limiting the content of my active projects created a positive feedback-loop that made me clean up everything I put off - contributing to even more efficient weekly reviews.

Those two things - Limiting WIP and renaming SomedayMaybe to Incubate, essentially fixed it for me. There are some more details to adress here around review-optimization, but these two items turned out to be the gist of the matter for me. I'm now able to do a meaningful review within an hour, and I actually look through my Incubate-files when doing it.