In his book, Getting Things Done, David Allen frequently reminds you that your mind isn’t a good archive for your work. Weekly review comes in as a process to change the plans in your head to external ones. This lets you spend a little time knowing what you need to prioritize and what needs to be trashed. This way, you can use your time to actually work on one thing at a time instead of stressing out. In the workplace, weekly review lets your team know what you’re doing. This will improve overall communication and align team and company goals.
Taking the steps to properly review everything on your plate serves as the key step to weekly review. When you complete items or update externally, you gain insight into what your work means and what steps you can take to take it to the next level. Likewise, weekly review is a great feedback system for others and opens the door for collaboration.
David Allen breaks up his GTD weekly review system into 11 steps. These steps can be reduced to 4 main ideas.
In David Allen’s steps, processing includes gathering all the materials you have. This is the first step. These include physical documents as well as messages and emails.
Once everything is collected, start processing it by either responding to it, completing it, or trashing it. Determine whether or not certain materials are worth saving or not.
The third step is to process any thoughts you have. Only do this once your materials have been sorted. From there, you can determine what you need to get done for the week and record it.
By far, this is the biggest category and the bulk of what you’ll be doing in weekly review. (It’s in the name after all!) The other steps are to enforce the usefulness of this one. You should have a system of what to review in what order so you can use your time efficiently.
FIRST, review your next actions. These are what you need to accomplish immediately and are tasks you are already familiar with. Make sure to mark them off as they are completed. Online app can help by letting you move your items from a plan category to a progress (done) category.
SECOND, review your calendar. Review your calendar from the previous week or, if it’s not overwhelming, from the quarter. This can inform you about things you may have missed and some references or ideas that may further inspire you. Then, review your future calendar and check for deadlines. This will let you know how much time you have to complete projects and what actionable steps you need to take to ensure you meet the deadline.
THIRD, review all your larger projects. Which ones have you completed? What steps do you need to take to complete others? Do you need to add any new projects to the list? Make sure that, in this process, that all your projects have a next action prepared so they actually get done.
Look at what you’re waiting for. See what you can do in order to ease communications to get these things done. Make a list of what you need from others and what your next actionable steps are when you obtain what you need.
Tracking also helps you make more creative decisions. Looking over and tracking down what will be useful from your someday/maybe list is an important step in the process.
The final step is to empty your mind of everything that has been bothering you about your schedule. This way, you know what you should be working on and don’t have to waste more time worrying about the deadlines of other items.
In 2014, Cornerstone OnDemand collaborated with Kelton to produce a study on the effects of increased workload on productivity. The study found that 68% of people suffer from work overload in the US and feel that this impacts their productivity.
This survey also highlighted that 52% of that 68% felt that the amount of work they needed to get done couldn’t get finished in a day. These statistics have been increasing, drawing from a study done the previous year in particular.
Out of the 3 main causes of declining productivity shown in the survey, 61% found that work overload was their main hurdle. Having work piled up and stressing about it is the clear main problem in the American workforce.
This constant focus on work and fear of deadlines means that work is always on the mind. So, instead of playing with the kids, you’re stuck inside sending emails out to schedule next week’s meetings. All because during your work hours you spent an hour and a half panicking about everything that needs to be done.
The best way to engage with this is to make an effort to write down what you need to accomplish, even at the team level. This way, everyone knows what to do and when the deadlines are. Projects that are not immediately relevant get tossed or put on a someday list, and that’s all the attention you need to give them.
When it comes to goal-setting, weekly review serves as a great way to connect your smaller, actionable items to larger goals. And, hey! If one of your goals is to get a hold of your task and project management systems, then weekly review can serve as your answer! Productivity should be a priority at every level, after all.
Getting Things Done (GTD) relies on weekly review to work outside the personal level. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a great first step into fixing productivity issues. But the issues regarding the system for the larger team or company goals isn’t addressed much. Allen’s system works very well for these levels, but requires a bit of adaptation to really implement throughout an entire company.
Like any productivity system, GTD is not perfect. The book desperately needs an update from its ancient origins of 2002. It doesn’t address the transparency and productivity tools that cloud-based software provides now. Likewise, it focuses far too much on what’s becoming obsolete in the business world. The biggest of these are physical paper documents in the “Get Clear” stage. Likewise, despite Allen saying that GTD can work for projects, you need a larger system to really bring projects in. That’s why GTD works so well with systems like weekly review or OKRs.
Obviously, the system is still solid. It just needs to be adapted to the modern workforce.
After getting the methodology from Allen, it’s a good idea to invest in a productivity tool that specializes in weekly review. Weekdone serves as a great option by connecting tasks to overarching goals so that everyone can see what everyone is working on.
Using traditional task managers actually makes it more difficult to do GTD right (from personal experience)! There aren’t many GTD exclusive apps out there, and those that market themselves as so are generally plain ol’ task managers like JIRA or ASANA. Missing features abound and these task managers miss the connection to the larger company goals.
Weekly review also is easier to adhere to other productivity habits.
David Allen has written extensively on what should be included in a weekly review and what shouldn’t be. It’s good to follow a basic guide to make sure that you’re on the right track. The weekly review is how you implement GTD and is your main key to success. If you are new to the process and haven’t made a habit of it, then following a weekly review checklist. This ensures that everyone can get used to the system.
David Allen summarizes 11 steps for weekly review.
These fit under 3 categories.
Check out our free weekly review checklist with downloadable pdf!
One thing David Allen doesn’t cover much in his book is the timeframe of the weekly review process. This can vary by person, but it’s still good to have a template in mind. Since weekly review is about planning the next week, we recommend that you start the process the Friday before.
Doing weekly reviews on a weekly basis takes time and commitment. Dedicating yourself to a weekly routine is far easier when weekly review is implemented as a team. If review is part of the reporting process, then individuals are more accountable to actually do it. Improving focus for an entire team means greater productivity becomes a group effort and not just an individual one.
So, here’s how my weekly review process looks:
My weekly review starts on Friday. I use Weekdone in order to compile my review since, you know, it’s our product. My entire schedule for the coming week depends on what I decide for weekly review on Friday. Likewise, we very rarely have meetings on Friday. We keep meetings for Monday or Wednesday so Friday can be saved to self-reflect and plan.
Personally, I take care of busy work first. I clean out the dishes in the sink, tidy up my desk, and look at my calendar. Doing small, non-communicative tasks first ensures they don’t become distractions later when I’m seriously doing my weekly review process.
Using Weekdone’s set-up, I look at my weekly tasks. What got done? What didn’t? Are the tasks that I had this week worth keeping for the next week? Likewise, I identify problems I ran into in the previous week. Maybe I’m waiting on someone for materials? Or, maybe I was just distracted by out-of-work things? These are useful to write down.
From there, I record what could have been done better as a team and rate my job satisfaction for the week. These include my confusion level and how I felt about the team.
From there, it’s time to handle things step by step:
On Monday, I take 10-20 minutes to write down everything new that entered my head that’s not already on my task manager or Weekdone. I review them in this order
From here, you’ll have the tools to create a more comprehensive review when Friday comes.
The two main ways to use weekly review as a team are to have a cloud-based, transparent tool where everyone can see updates and to conduct weekly review meetings. From there, you can use the entire team’s brainpower to determine if you’re reaching our goals. If not, what needs to be changed?
There are an infinite number of tools that offer a cloud-based newsfeed and weekly reporting system. But, since I do work for Weekdone, Weekdone is obviously the tool I’m the most used to. Weekdone syncs with other applications including Asana and JIRA, so it’s easy to bring materials to Weekdone using preexisting tools WHILE increasing overall company transparency.
