studio non troppo : mindful design : facilitation

Photo: jeremyfoo

I’ve written before about the virtues of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. I still think there’s nothing like it for taming information overload and actually “getting things done.”

But it’s not easy for most mortals to keep the GTD machine purring along, day in and day out. There are times when I find myself adding more and more to my inbox without taking the time to process all the new material coming in. Soon, I have dozens of parallel projects that aren’t behaving.

They all seem to shout, “take care of me now!”

It can take me awhile to see that my GTD system needs a tune-up. Over the past couple of weeks for example, the tasks and projects kept piling up, and I thought I had everything organized well enough to manage them. But then I noticed how I was feeling: frustrated, overwhelmed, and under too much pressure.

I realized I hadn’t done my GTD “weekly review” for about three weeks.

The weekly review is where all the inbox items get processed. It’s a housecleaning of the mansion of projects. Not a full-blown spring cleaning, but the kind of cleaning where you at least go into all the rooms to make sure you know where you’re living.

When life is especially fluid, when projects are being born or morphing structurally every day, it can be moving too quickly to take good notes. But these are the times when it’s especially critical to regroup by doing your GTD weekly review.

I’m going to do mine today.