GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Review "Someday/Maybe" List Check for any projects that may have become active and transfer them to "Projects." Delete items no longer of interest.

Review "Pending" and Support Files Browse through all work-in-progress support material to trigger new actions, completions, and waiting-fors.

Be Creative and Courageous Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can add to your system?

This review process is common sense, but few of us do it as well as we could, and that means as regularly as we should to keep a clear mind and a sense of relaxed control.

"Point of view" is that quintessential!)? human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum. . . . In a world of hyper abundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources.

— Paul

The Right Time and Place for the Review

The Weekly Review is so critical that it behooves you to establish good habits, environments, and tools to support it. Once your comfort zone has been established for the kind of relaxed control that Getting Tilings Done is all about, you won't have to worry too much about making yourself do your review—you'll have to to get back to your personal standards again.

Until then, do whatever you need to, once a week, to trick yourself into backing away from the daily grind for a couple of hours—not to zone out, but to rise up at least to "10,000 feet" and catch up.

If you have the luxury of an office or work space that can be somewhat isolated from the people and interactions of the day, and if you have anything resembling a typical Monday-to-Friday workweek, I recommend that you block out two hours early every Friday afternoon for the review. Three factors make this an ideal time:

• The events of the week are likely to be still fresh enough for you to be able to do a complete postmortem ("Oh, yeah, I need to make sure I get back to her about...").

• When you (invariably) uncover actions that require reaching people at work, you'll still have time to do that before they leave for the weekend.

• It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind.

You may be the kind of person, however, who doesn't have normal weekends. I, for example, often have as much to do on Saturday and Sunday as on Wednesday. But I do have the luxury(?) of frequent long plane trips, which provide an ideal opportunity for me to catch up. A good friend and client of mine, an executive in the world's largest aerospace company, has his own Sunday-night ritual of relaxing in his home office and processing the hundreds of notes he's generated during his week of back-to-back meetings.

Whatever your life-style, you need a weekly regrouping ritual. You likely have something like this (or close to it) already. If so, leverage the habit by adding into it a higher-altitude review process.

The people who find it hardest to make time for this review are those who have constantly on-demand work and home environments, with zero built-in time or space for regrouping. The most stressed professionals I have met are the ones who have to be mission-critically reactive at work (e.g., high-level equities traders and chiefs of staff) and then go home to a couple of under-ten-year-old children and a spouse who also works. The more fortunate of them have a one-hour train commute.

If you recognize yourself in that picture, your greatest challenge will be to build in a consistent process of regrouping, when your world is not directly in your face. You'll need to either accept the requirement of an after-hours time at your desk on a Friday night or establish a relaxed but at-work kind of location and time at home.

Executive Operational Review Time I've coached many executives to block out two hours on their calendars on Fridays. For them the biggest problem is how to balance quality thinking and catch-up time with the urgent demands of mission-critical inter-actions. This is a tough call. The most senior and savvy of them, however, know the value of sacrificing the seemingly urgent for the truly important, and they create their islands of time for some version of this process.

Your best thoughts about work won't happen while you're at work.