David Allen calls the Weekly Review the “critical success factor” to GTD. Why? It’s the glue that keeps it all together.  It’s also one of the steps people tend to resist the most.  Here are some keys for getting the most out of the Review phase to keep your GTD system humming along.

WHAT TO REVIEW:

There are 11 steps in the GTD Weekly Review.  David Allen recommends leading yourself through this every 7-10 days to get clear, current, and creative.

Get clear – ensure all your “stuff” is processed

Collect Loose Papers and Materials
Get “IN” to Zero
Empty Your Head
[Read more →]

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Get help in your journey with GTD. Join two Senior David Allen Company Coaches for a 14-day GTD Challenge, designed to bring your productivity to a whole new level.  The Challenge will take place between September 22  and October 6 and is hosted by our online learning community, GTD Connect. Free and open to all GTD Connect members (including those on a two-week guest pass.)

Part one will kick off with a live webinar on September 22nd, going over GTD best practices and giving you tools to design a game plan for maximizing your efficiency and GTD systems. In other words, how well can you “do” GTD? How much better could your systems be?

At the end of the 14 days, on October 6th, part two will bring participants back together on a webinar to look back on your successes, lessons learned, and tips for making positive changes stick.

Intended for those who have at least a basic understanding of GTD, as it will build on the core models for control & perspective.

Login to GTD Connect to register through the links on the home page. Questions? Contact us at connect@davidco.com.

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I was leading a GTD class recently, and one of the participants was asking me how to be better at delegating. In my experience, issues with delegation typically come down to some common factors:

• It’s not clear who should do it (i.e. unclear Areas of Focus)
• If the person delegating is not clear on their own inventory, in their integrity and confidence they won’t feel like they can hand off things to others (doesn’t quite fly to say, “I can’t do this because I have a gnawing sense of overwhelm–but can you?”)
• If the person delegating doesn’t have a clear way to track what they are handing off (a la Waiting For or Agenda lists) they won’t feel confident in handing things off
• Perfection (anyone ever have the feeling “I can do it better/faster myself?”)
• People often feel funny using the word “delegate” with peers or their managers–so just call it “hand off” instead (truly–tricks that like can work)
• The person delegating is not clear what they are even delegating

My Agenda and Waiting For lists are often my longest lists. I have Agendas for all of the key people I meet with or report to on a regular basis. My Waiting For list (currently 68 items) tracks anything and everything I may want to rein back in at some point.  To me, these lists are like fishing lines off a boat and I just need trusted and easy ways to reel things back in when I need them.

How well do you handle delegation? Do you ever hesitate to delegate something to others? If so, why?

Kelly Forrister is a senior coach and presenter with the David Allen Company

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Our next webinar on GTD Connect will come at a perfect time for many of you after the holidays. Two of our senior coaches are hosting a “Jumpstart GTD” webinar to give you tips, tricks and strategies to get your GTD systems in top shape for 2011.

Join us on Friday, January 14th from 10am-11am Pacific Time.

Free for all GTD Connect guest pass, monthly and annual members. To register for the webinar, log in to GTD Connect and follow the link on the home page.

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One of the things that helps me stay current with my GTD system and not have the Weekly Review feel like a major renovation, is that I review my Next Actions lists whenever I feel like it and as often as I can.  Whenever I coach people who have slipped out of regular reviews (call it daily quick scans and weekly thorough reviews) I see them start to triage all of the “important stuff” onto their Calendar, which they know they will look at.  Then the calendar becomes an fuzzy merge of the stuff that really belongs on the calendar (time-specific and day-specific) with the “stuff-I-put-on-the-calendar-so-it-doesn’t-get-lost-on-a-list.” Inevitably, they find themselves carrying things over from day to day just to keep it alive.

Do you need to review every list every day? Of course not. But use those weird windows of time that show up in your day to pop over to a list for a little visit. You might start to find it’s like meeting up with a good friend who is happy to see you.

More about Kelly…

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One of the most common questions we hear from GTDers is which list manager they should use.  You’ve heard from us on this in loads of webinars, podcasts, articles and blog posts. We thought we would pass along a fellow GTDers comment to someone on our Forums, which we thought was great advice, especially for someone new to GTD:

Buy the new GTD Implementation Guide in PDF, and David’s first book. Read them carefully and use paper for a few weeks. You will become a far-better informed shopper for any digital solution for managing lists. -  rdgeorge

The GTD Implemenation Guide

David’s first book, Getting Things Done

Coach Kelly Forrister’s article on How to Choose a GTD System

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We are pleased to announce the release of a resource that many of you have been asking for:  a  GTD & BlackBerry Guide.  A few of us are now on BlackBerry as our portable solution and we put together a Guide on the best GTD tips, tricks, and practices for making your BlackBerry rock for GTD.

It’s chock-full of 45 pages of coaching advice on getting the most out of shortcuts, Email, Tasks, the Calendar and MemoPad using the built-in features of a BlackBerry (which means you won’t find any  requirements of any 3rd-party software to buy to apply what’s in the Guide.)

Download a free sample

Buy the Guide now (only $10 for a PDF)

So…the next question that’s been pouring into our customer service department today:  What about a GTD Guide for iPhone users? [Read more →]

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The next Webinar on GTD Connect will be “Digging Out From Backlog”.  Two of our senior coaches will give you tips, tricks, and strategies for dealing with your piles of “stuff”.  If you feel like your backlog is holding you back from getting the most out of GTD, this Webinar is for you.  Free to all GTD Connect members (free trial members too).   Thursday, July 15 @ 11am PDT.  Register on the home page of GTD Connect.

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We just posted the 5th podcast in our best practices series that we are making available to the public (which are normally exclusive to GTD Connect.)  Listen or download now.

You’ll hear insights, tips and tricks from David Allen and two of the senior coaches on this key phase of GTD. It’s about 30 minutes and chock full of helpful coaching advice.

If you missed the first 4 in this series (Collect, Process, Organize & Review), you can find them all in the free GTD podcast feed.  If you like these free podcasts, we have loads more like this on GTD Connect, our online learning center.

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A GTDer asked: I am using the GTD Outlook Add-In software. Should I create subprojects?

Coach Kelly: I personally don’t use the subproject feature of software.  For me, everything is just a Project. But if you do decide to use it, it can be a nice way to sort major components of a large project. For example, let’s say you are getting married.  You could have “Get married” as the project that you track, however, there would be many, many
steps that would fall under that.  Some people would choose to create subprojects for each of the major components, such as:

Project =
Get Married

Subprojects =
Rehearsal Dinner
Ceremony
Reception
Honeymoon

I’d say it’s an optional feature in the Add-In, not required. Only use it if it helps you. Don’t use that feature if it seems confusing or more complicated than you need. [Addendum: this is my universal feedback for people on creating your system.  Use as many features as you need, but as few as you can get by with.]

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