As the name suggests the Weekly Review function of GTD is where you reflect on the current state of your system, refreshing it to update changes and progress you have made.
GTD author David Allen shares his thoughts on what a good GTD Weekly Review is and isn’t in their podcast on the topic, highlighting it is the “critical success factor” in making your GTD practice stick.
Productivity95 reflects on it further in this detailed article on how to implement it, with further considerations for making it successful by incorporating in other practices, such as ‘Life Planning’ from the book Living Forward, so that your review is linked to the big and important thinking about your life.
To Do Task Manager
In this video Collaboration Coach Matt walks through how to use Microsoft Task Manager for your Weekly Review.
From 0m:50s he begins to demonstrate using To Do for this, which builds on his previous video on how to use it for the core task capture and management process.
He creates a new task list called the Weekly Review, adding specific GTD actions such as ‘Get Clear’, the process of making sure that all loose ends such as paper documents that need actioned (receipts, business cards etc.), as well as clearing your email inbox and your mind!
At 1m:47s he shows how to schedule this task list as a recurring weekly item.
From 2m:14s he adds another list called ‘Get Current’, which is a process of reviewing what you did last week and what you plan for next week. This is then sub-divided down into your Next Actions list, an essential GTD activity, analyzing what tasks are dependent on other people, and is also scheduled a recurring weekly item.
At 3m:23s Matt then starts a ‘Get Creative’ list, which is for a more open ended personal brainstorm of possible items to work on, what GTD defines as your Someday Maybe List. Another way to think of these is personal ‘stretch goals‘, ie. a way of considering some ambitious targets you may want to set yourself for the coming week.
Scheduling the Review
Matt then moves on to explaining how to run the review, at 4m:20s, where he stresses how importantly you treat it, as if it’s a critical meeting with a customer and blocking it in your calendar so you won’t be disturbed. He shows how you can use Viva app in Teams to do this.
