I do the standard weekly review on Sunday nights, religiously. In fact, I often start shelving stuff starting Friday evening on because I can count on knocking it out while I review. It’s a good checkpoint, not too often to become onerous, but not spaced out far enough that I feel like things are getting out of hand. I go through all the standard stuff, my to-do’s, projects, clean out the email, process receipts, and even try to think about whether I’m sticking to my stated goals.

I’ve tried doing some more high-minded montly and yearly reviews, but other than the general, New Year’s resolution kind of recomittment feeling they give you, they seemed too Stephen Covey, touchy-feely to be of much good. As long as I’ve been adamant about a comprehensive weekly review, I feel good.

I’ve had a hard time getting the review to be a regular thing. When looking at why this is, I realized that the full-on weekly review was just so daunting. It would take hours to get through it all, and the only time I could corral the time for this (Friday afternoons or over the weekend), I would have a hard time getting myself into it.

I heard an interview with one of the GTD coaches on the David Allen podcast, and the coach said that she describes GTD by using four areas:

1) Collect 2) Process 3) Review 4) Do

I know this isn’t new to anyone who’s read the book, but in hearing it again, I realized that my trouble with the review is that I’m doing #1, 2, and 3 all at the same time. For me, these are three very different brain functions. Once I got done collecting, I could rarely get myself into the processing phase and almost never into the review phase to finish the process.

So instead of doing a weekly review, I decided to try doing one of the first three processes for the first 15 minutes of work every day, before I start doing. Some days, I’ll do a 15-minute brain dump. Others, I’ll process everything in my inbox and focus on being sure to have next action verbs. Sometimes, I’ll just review my someday, waiting, ticklers, and action lists to be sure everything is in the right spot.

I’ve only just started this breaking up of the weekly review, but for the first time, I’ve actually gotten through all the stuff I’d wanted to do — in steps instead of one whopping group. So far, it seems to be working.

One of the problems that I have been dealing with is the large number of Ins that I have. I have things scattered all over the place, so it is often impossible to have everything in front of me to process once a week.

I have Ins:

• in 3 physical offices - Main, @ Client, and Home
• email inbox
• Moleskine notebook
• voicemail
• stuff collected in Yojimbo
• stuff collected in MentalCase
• My kitchen counter
• My car
• My briefcase

I do my Weekly Review on Firday afternoon in the same office every time, so before I leave my @ Client office for the last time in the week, I make sure the Inbox there is empty, even if I have to take a bunch of stuff with me. I also collect everything at my home office Thursday morning. I try to spend Thrusday afternoon at my main office Getting to Zero as much as possible. Then on Friday, I only have to collect what has happened since Thursday afternoon, process everything and then review.

They key, no matter how many Ins you have, is to make sure everything gets collected at least once a week. You can’t do a real review if there is anything unaccounted for.