The Weekly Review Is an Operating System

Tiago Forte on why weekly habits are the hardest kind — frequent enough to be load-bearing, not frequent enough to become automatic. The reframe: the weekly review isn’t a task, it’s the operating system every other program runs on. Descends from Getting Things Done.

Notes

• Getting Things Done by David Allen #books-to-read
• Based on my experience with habit formation: weekly habits exist on an unstable middle ground. They happen frequently enough to be lynchpins in your weekly productivity, yet not often enough to be natural habits in your daily productivity.
• I think a good model for thinking of the Weekly Review is as an operating system. It is the backbone of everything else that happens during your week; the master program on which all other programs run; the environment that creates the context for hundreds of small decisions and behaviors.
• But this short checklist represents something very meaningful to me: the ability to go from total chaos to total clarity in 15–30 minutes. It can handle any type of information, from any source, in any quantity, over any period of time. It doesn’t matter if I’m checking in after a couple calm days of work, or returning from 3 weeks of vacation. I follow the same steps in the same order. I’ve put enough design thinking into it that, in the moment, I trust that all open loops will be appropriately handled. This confidence produces an almost meditative state as I proceed through the list one item at a time.
• My rule of thumb is to look two weeks into the past, for anything I need to follow up on, and 4 weeks into the future, for anything I need to start preparing for. Daily Routine
• I also review my paper notebook, capturing any open loops in my task manager, taking photos of any pages I want to keep using the Evernote app, and drawing a diagonal line from one corner of the page to the other to show that it’s been captured.
• I’ve found over the years that simply following up with people is one of the easiest ways to get what I want or need. I begin any task that I’m waiting for someone on with “waiting for: [what I’m waiting on them for]”, so I can quickly call up all my followup tasks across all projects with one search, even if I’m on the go.
• What I’m left with after Part III is a concise, clearly formulated, prioritized, sequenced list of next actions for the day, grouped by project and available at a glance on my mobile device. I don’t have to do any more meta-thinking after this— my intellectual horsepower is dedicated to creating value, not keeping balls in the air.
• Your Weekly Review is your scheduled departure from chaos back into order. It is your appointment with all your various selves, each tasked to ponder and monitor and track and evaluate different areas of your life, to regroup and share notes. It is the referee whistle blowing a time out, giving you the chance to resynchronize the many threads running at different time scales, different speeds, foreground and background, professional and personal, important and urgent. It is your time to purge the low-level thinking that clogs your synapses in one fell swoop, leaving your mind free for expansive intuition the rest of the time.