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hPDA and the Weekly Review: Match Made In Heaven

I think we all agree that the Weekly Review is key to doing a good job with GTD - of course, even Allen explicitly says it's perhaps the key to GTD.

Though it seems like drudgery, I love the fact that I have to toss my "next actions" index cards once a week (once they're filled with mostly-completed actions and I have no room for new actions) and copy the remaining items onto a fresh set of index cards.

It's the perfect time to do a Weekly Review because it requires thinking about each action as its recopied: "Do I still want to do this? Is this a project in disguise? Should this get moved to Someday/Maybe?"

This is one of the best reasons to go with a paper-based GTD implementation rather than a digital one in my opinion. I can confidently state that I'd have a tough time doing my Weekly Review if my next actions were in digital form.

This is true for any paper-based GTD implementation, of course - but it's particularly true for a hPDA implementation due to the small size of the index cards.

Disclaimer: This only applies if you're doing a full GTD implementation on an hPDA. If you're using a hPDA solely as your "mobile Inbox", it's less true. Although you'll have to process your Inbox more often, at least. :)

TOPICS: Lofi
edosan's picture

Agreed. When I started my...

Agreed. When I started my own implementation of GTD, I didn't like how marked up my cards got after a week of working. "They look all messy and disorganized. I'll have to redo them all the time!"

...and then the light bulb went off above my head. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be! It's an odd motivation, but that forces me to do a weekly review (perhaps more or less than weekly, but when the cards are getting marked up, it's time to look further down the road).

 
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