Transcription
Hello and welcome back to the Todoist Channel. My name is Naomi, and in today's video, we are going to talk about what I personally believe to be probably the most important productivity habit, and that is the weekly review. Seriously, I believe that pretty much everyone could benefit from a weekly review, and don't be fooled into thinking that a weekly review is just about looking back. It's very much also about looking forward.
If you've never heard of it before, the weekly review was actually created by productivity consultant David Allen as part of his Getting Things Done method. There are three distinct sections to the weekly review, and they are: Get Clear, process all of your loose ends; Get Current, make sure everything is up to date; and Get Creative, so come up with new ideas to improve how you live and work. Also, if you make it to the end of this video, you could be in with a chance to win a free year of Todoist Pro.
Now, you might wonder, why should you include a weekly review as part of your routine? Isn't it just creating more work for yourself? But actually, there are so many benefits to having a weekly review. It can help you get an objective view of your week ahead. It can help you clarify your thinking, spot patterns. It's really good for helping with decision-making as well. Also, for me personally, it is the profound sense of peace I have in knowing that I have a game plan for each of the days of my week ahead. Basically, a weekly review just provides you with clarity and direction, which are two things that are very often missing whenever we go into reactive mode.
So, who should be doing a weekly review? I said it at the top, I think everybody should. But it is particularly helpful for you if any of these apply: You usually start the week without a plan and you just wing it. You feel busy, but you haven't made any real progress towards your goals. You feel like you're always in a reactive mode, dealing with other people's requests and putting out fires. Or seriously, just everybody and anybody. Basically, if you've got a heartbeat and you're trying to adult, do a weekly review.
The beauty of a weekly review is you don't have to adopt a new productivity method. It can fit seamlessly in with time blocking, Pomodoros, OKRs. We have videos on all of those. I will link them in the description box below. But as with everything that we give as advice on this channel, take it and make it your own. It is highly customizable. A weekly review should be something that reflects you personally, what's important to you, what your life looks like, what your schedule looks like. Everyone's different, and it's really crucial that you make your weekly review work for your life.
So, how do you complete a weekly review? Well, first things first, set yourself up for success. If you choose a consistent time and a consistent place to do your weekly review, it is more likely that you're going to stick to it, because consistency is going to help you keep going when motivation won't. I really think the key to this is to choose a time that really does work best for you and your schedule, but then also choose a place that is enjoyable. It's somewhere that you want to be. Some people do it from their desk on a Friday afternoon, and that's totally fine. But if you link it with something that you look forward to, say maybe your favorite coffee from your favorite coffee shop, then you're maybe a little bit more likely to want to go and keep up with that routine.
Now, in terms of time, choose what works for your schedule. Not everybody's week starts on a Monday, and so for some people, doing it on a Wednesday might be best. Or maybe it's a Friday afternoon at work. Maybe it's a Sunday morning. That's when I tend to do mine. But whatever fits best into your life and your schedule, pick that time and stick with it. I actually used to split my weekly review, so I would do my work weekly review on a Friday afternoon and my home weekly review or personal weekly review on a Sunday morning, and it felt a little bit like overkill. And then since we've actually introduced team workspaces into Todoist, where you can collaborate with your team and do all of your project planning in there, I now don't really need to split it anymore. So I just do one weekly review on a Sunday, and I can look at my personal tasks and my team tasks all in the one tool, and that has actually given me more of a holistic view of my week, to be honest. So I just now do it on a Sunday morning. I love my weekly review. You can probably tell from the enthusiasm in this video for weekly reviews. I sit down on a Sunday morning, my kids, I make sure they're occupied with some kind of activity or, let's be honest, a screen. And I will sit down. I will have my calendar, I will have everything that I need in front of me, my notebooks, my Todoist, my email inbox, all my stuff. I make a nice hot drink, and I usually have a pastry, and I spend an hour. And it feels really actually like me time. It feels like time dedicated to my future sanity for the week. So I relish it, and yeah, I'm not giving it up for anything. We would recommend around an hour for this. For some people, it's going to be less, and for some people, it's going to be more. But there are 168 hours in the week, and so dedicating 1 hour means that you're optimizing your other 167, which feels like a bargain.
Get Clear. Start by thinking of paper items, physical things that you could put in an inbox. I actually have a metal inbox tray. It lives in my dining room. That's where everything goes: receipts, school permission slips, random things that come in the mail. Anything that's paper goes in that in-tray, and then on a Sunday morning, it gets processed. Then think about your other inboxes: that could be your text messages, social media messages, emails. Uh, if you have like a work task management system, for us, that's Todoist. Anything that has an inbox or where there's pending items that should get processed as well. So that means clearing everything out, making tasks for anything that you need to tackle, filing in anything that you don't. And then my favorite part of getting clear is emptying your head. I know some of my colleagues will just open up their Todoist inbox and just dump in all of the tasks that they have rattling around in their brain. For me personally, I like to handwrite it. So I get just an A4 sheet of paper, lined, and I just make a list, big old massive list of everything that's on my mind. Then I transfer that into Todoist. My reasoning behind that is that some of it's absolute nonsense that doesn't actually need to be actioned, and it's just, you know, taking up space in my mind. And then some of it is are things that need to be actioned, and they go into Todoist.
Get Current. Once you've got your list of everything that you need to do, take a look at your next actions. Is there anything that you need to tackle in the upcoming week? Take a look back over your calendar. Now, this one is a little bit strange because you'd think that looking back isn't going to really help you with planning forward. But actually, when you look at your calendar and you see all the things that you've done over the last two to three weeks, you'll maybe remember a doctor's appointment that needs followed up, or something in there that needs paid. Or, you know, there's a lot of little triggers that lie in your calendar that can help you form what's coming up this week, or what you need to do this week. And then take a look at your upcoming calendar. Do you have things in there that you've completely forgotten about? Do you need to do anything for those things that you may have completely forgotten about, like a birthday party or a work meeting? Is there something there that needs your attention? If you have a waiting for list, now is a good time to review that. A waiting for list is basically a list of things that you're waiting for. So it could be correspondence from a colleague, or it could even be something as simple as something you ordered online that hasn't been delivered yet. Review your projects list. So whether you've got an actual list of all of your projects into Todoist or not, we all have projects on the go. A work project that you're really focusing on at the moment. It could be getting your garden ready for spring. It could be some renovation work. It could even be a project that you're doing with your kids. Take a look through all of these things and note any next actions that you could have coming up this week. It's also a good time to dedicate some next actions to things that you really want to drive forward. Review any other relevant checklists that you have. You may already have, or you may want to create checklists for things that are important to you. That could be say, a financial planning checklist to keep you on top of your financial goals. It could be a list of the people that matter most to you, and you want to go through that list and make sure that you've reached out to them or helped them in some way. I have one of those, and I find it really helpful. It stops me from letting people slide too far down my messages.
Get Creative. Review your someday maybe list. If you don't have one of these, I highly, highly recommend one. It is basically a list of the things that you can't get to right now, but you would like to do someday maybe. These could be business ideas, vacation plans, books to read, places to visit, people to see, hobbies to pick up. Anything that you know you can't get to right now, but you do want to keep on your mind, put it in your someday maybe list. And then when you're doing your weekly review and you get to this list, you can take a look through it and figure out if any of these things can happen today or this week. Creative and courageous. Basically, as you wrap up your weekly review, this is your chance to really think about your dreams. Think about your dreams, your goals, things that you really want to pursue in your life. And it helps you think about these things not just as big aspirational things, but also something that can be broken down and put into your weekly review so that you can stand a chance at actually making it a reality.
Reflect and Plan. This is an opportunity to ask yourself some juicy questions for what happened the week before and how you want the next week to go. These could be questions like: What patterns am I seeing in my working behavior? What did I accomplish last week? Was there anybody that I should have reached out to that I didn't? The nature of these questions is to just get you to reflect on what went right and what went wrong in the week previous, so that you have a chance to do better in the week coming up. And then when you've got all of this information in front of you, which seems like a lot, but actually it's not that much whenever you get into the practice of it, your priorities tend to float to the surface, and then you know exactly what you need to be focusing on for the week ahead.
Now, you might be thinking, Naomi, that was a lot of information. Where do I even start with all of this? Well, we actually have a Todoist template that is a Getting Things Done weekly review template. Download it, cut it to pieces, and make your own. That's exactly what I did with mine. But it is a great starting point because there are so many prompts in there that are going to get your brain ticking over. And I will leave you with this quote from David Allen's Getting Things Done: "The weekly review is the critical success factor for marrying your larger commitments to your day-to-day activities." And then this from us: A weekly review is going to give you 52 opportunities in the year for a fresh start. It's going to give you 52 opportunities to improve on what happened the week before, and it's going to give you 52 opportunities to learn a little bit more about yourself and how you work. So if I haven't convinced you by now, then I don't know what to tell you.
And if you would like that opportunity to win a year of free Todoist Pro, then all you need to do is comment in the comment section below. We want to hear: Do you do a weekly review? What's included in your weekly review? If you don't do a weekly review, would you consider it after this video? And that's us for today. Thank you so much for watching, and if you like, you can give us a thumbs up, you can subscribe to the channel, you could leave us a comment. All of these things are massively helpful and massively appreciated. And on that note, I will see you in the next one. Bye.
You can still hear me. Oh, wow. They are very dirty glasses. Objectify. No, there are so many benefits to having a weekly. Can't just, can never say the word productivity. Hello Kitty Cat. Conclude. Conclude.