Weekly Review: September 15
I’ve been reading on-again, off-again about Getting Things Done (GTD), and one thing I’ve decided to implement is the Weekly Review (WR), and what better way to make sure I stick to implementing it than to blog publicly about it?
The basic idea behind the WR is to process stuff that went on during the week, get things out of the way and refocus on the next week. There are various ways to do it with varying specifications, but as a starting point, I’ve picked three points from Scott Young, as well as one of my own.
1) Expenses review
I’m usually pretty meticulous about this in Singapore, but the combination of traveling and using cards has meant I haven’t kept an eye on expenditure since I left Singapore three weeks ago. While I’m not revealing this part explicitly, I have set a budget and in the next update, will tell you whether I managed to stick to it or not.
2) Social review
This is really just forecasting what social stuff I have this week so you know when to schedule what.. Outside of Podcamp Montreal, where I’ll head down to Montreal from Friday to Sunday, it looks like a large portion it is going to be spontaneous and unscheduled.
3) Learning review
I finished Cult of the Amateur this week and will review what I learned (don’t worry, it’s not much) on my other blog by Wednesday.
4) Goals for the week
This is my section and I have a few things I feel I’ve been putting off for the longest time:
- Get down to baking - I didn’t bring my recipe with me, so I hope Google serves me well
- Various academic stuff - I shall not bore you with the details
- Clearing my bookmarks and GMarks - This is easily going to take me half a day
- Read a chapter a day of the books I’ve gotten from Amazon - I’ve picked Assassin’s Apprentice and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day
- Laugh at my investment banking friends - This is only semi-serious, but I just gotta do it
Writing this down, it doesn’t seem like much, but it’ll be a good stepping stone for the WR, which I’ll revise again next week. Wish me luck!
You are certainly correct in picking the weekly review as the most important component of GTD. So many blog posts I’ve read really miss the importance of this review. I probably overdo it, doing a weekly review twice a week, but that’s what it takes to keep my next actions focused and appropriate.
The beauty of the application I use is that I can do the review anywhere because it allows me to view my entire GTD at work on my Win machine, at home on my Macs and even on my cell phone. And another app lets me call in tasks to my GTD without any writing or typing, great for those thoughts that hit me while driving. I’ve written about my experiences with GTD in a blog post at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/more-getting-things-done/ John
@John: Thanks for dropping by! I see you’re (relatively) new to GTD as well. Would love to keep reading about your developments! I’ve similarly found an app which I love that lets me sync up either on mobile or desktop and will blog about it soon!
[...] week’s Weekly Review (WR) worked pretty well for me, but not perfectly, which was to be expected for the first [...]