Silver Clipboard

Weekly Review Secret: Allowing Productive Mess into Your Life

When starting with Getting Things Done, the weekly review is the most hassle and seems the least important. Why, if you are following such a perfect system, do you even need a weekly review?

The dark secret of the weekly review is that what you actually need is an imperfect system. Life isn’t perfect, life is messy. Many short-term projects work better with mess, e.g. in a perfect world, computer desktops would always look like this:

During the week, however, documents started or files downloaded get dumped onto the desktop, so that by the end of the week it’s covered with icons. It’s a mess. And that’s the way it should be.

The time spent organizing those files isn’t worth it — they have a small window of usefulness. Creating a folder somewhere for such ephemera is a waste of effort.

By dropping transient items in a prominent area like the desktop, they serve as reminders of the stuff you’re currently working on. The mess is a visible representation of temporary little projects and shows you when you have too much going on by growing too large.

However, if you don’t keep little messes in check, they will grow out of control. This is where the weekly review comes in. When it’s time for the weekly review, everything gets processed off the desktop. Everything. Each file is filed, deleted or sent. The desktop mess is kept on a tight leash — it exists only on the desktop and for no longer than seven days. This way the overall system is organized but can still take advantage of some of the benefits of mess.

This idea of limited mess applies to the overall GTD system. Don’t always be pristine with next actions and projects: keep odd scraps of papers and notes, leave files in a mess box. But, don’t let the messes grow and overwhelm you: reign them in during the weekly review.

While David Allen fundamentalists say this is heresy, even he says in The Book that there are times when the cost of running a perfectly smooth system is too great.

Allow some mess into your life, just keep it on a leash by reviewing it weekly.

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Header photograph by Ella’s Dad