Schedule A Weekly Review To Get Proactive About Your Commitments

The “weekly review” is a core component of many productivity techniques, including Getting Things Done (GTD), but in this interview, David Allen explains that the weekly review doesn’t have to be a complicated, monolithic event that you organise for yourself — all that’s truly necessary is that you take some time to examine your commitments on a regular basis and make some notes about things you don’t want to forget.

Allen calls the process “managing the forest instead of hugging the trees”, a pretty apt metaphor for how we tend to walk through our day to day life at the office. If your work, or even your personal life, feels more like a thing that happens to you passively instead of a series of events you have some control over, then you may need to clear out a little time every few days — Allen suggests an hour or two every six or seven days — where you can clear off your desk and review what you’ve done, what you have to do next week, who you have to call or reach out to, and reflect on your overall progress.

Note that this isn’t a time for you to actually do anything, just a review, as the name implies. Take a look at the video above for some more tips on setting up your weekly review, and why it’s so important that you do. Do you already take some time to review your progress and projects? How do you do it? Let us know in the comments.

David Allen Talks About the GTD Weekly Review [YouTube via David Allen (Twitter)]