I read an article by a guy who has eliminated weekly reviews from his workflow. He says they never worked for him:
- It took too much of his time and mental bandwidth to do them,
- It was tedious in the extreme and he had to force himself to do it, and
- It’s more productive to be “executing” than reviewing,
Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have that weekly chore (and could still get your work done)?
But how? How do you ensure you’re keeping the right balls in the air and doing everything you need to do?
One way he does that is to review everything that needs reviewing at the time he captures it. A few seconds while it’s fresh in his mind.
Basically, that means looking at it and thinking about it long enough to decide if (and where) to file it or tag it to work on in the ordinary course of his work.
I guess you could describe this as a 30-second review, done one small item at a time.
Anyway, by doing it immediately instead of saving everything to process later, he spares himself from looking at everything once a week at a time when he may have forgotten why he captured it.
Do it (review it) immediately and be done with it.
This means he no longer has to go back through the previous week’s tasks, notes, and documents, and recall what they are and recall what he thought about each one some days ago. Sorta a “touch once” rule.
But, if the item or task requires more than a few seconds to think about, fix or work on, he schedules time to do that. Time to “do” it, not review it (because he’s already done that).
What do you think?
What I think is that as tempting as it would be to eliminate the weekly review, I’m not sure I’m ready to do that. As I wrote recently, I can do a brief weekly review in 15 or 20 minutes and I find this is time well spent.
What I will do as a result of hearing this idea, however, is to be more mindful of the notes and tasks that go into my Inbox at the time I collect them. That means deciding what I think and intend to do with it, and making a few notes about that, at the time I capture it instead of deferring this until the end of the week.
Processing things on the spot that way might let me get my weekly review down to 5 or 10 minutes.
