5. Step 4 in GTD: Reflect

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

Morten: Hi and welcome to episode number 5 of the Getting Things Done podcast from the GTD Nordic. I'm here with my friend and colleague Lars Rothschild Henriksen. Hello, Lars.

Lars: Hi, Morten. Happy to be here again, and as before, I'm really looking forward to, to this episode as well.

Morten: Yes, me too, because this is a special episode where you will be able to learn how to reflect. Isn't that true?

Lars: That's correct. So we are at podcast episode number 5, but step number 4 in the 5 steps of mastering workflow. And just to recap, if you're new to this podcast, our goal is to support you in using the GTD methodology to clear your mind, to stay present, with whatever you're doing and to help you achieve stress-free productivity. And we really hope you find these episodes valuable regardless of your experience with GTD.

Morten: And this, today's episode is special because it's what we call a keystone habit in the GTD methodology. If you want to get good at mastering life and work, this is an absolute necessary, necessary thing to do. If you do not reflect on a regular basis, you will not have the, the biggest potential of GTD released. At least that's my, both my personal experience, and this is also what we teach. Isn't it so, Lars?

Lars: Yes, exactly. And, and everyone, basically everyone that I speak to are struggling with trying to stop their, their work actually and just And reflect, really taking the time to reflect. And it's a challenging habit to implement and really do on a weekly basis as we recommend. It's, you know, we all have busy lives, we all have a lot to do, we all have more to do than we have time to do. So taking the time to stop and reflect is really critical and really a behavior that's missing for so many people.

Morten: Yes, exactly. And it's I'm going to be very honest with everyone here is that I still struggle to make this happen. It's hard work, but it's so well worth it afterwards. I normally would, normally when I explain this to people, I would explain it like when you plan good for going on a vacation where you really are feeling comfortable with that everything is under control until you come back. This good feeling of you can really relax, you can take a good vacation without work moving into your head. This feeling is obtainable every week, not only when you are doing it when going for vacation in the summer vacation or winter vacation. So it's really valuable because you feel that you really are in control of the situation. Do you agree, Lars?

Lars: Yes, I can certainly recognize that. And I don't know how many— so I normally do mine on a Friday and I don't know how many Fridays we need to step back to see me also struggling to find the time to do this after a week of seminars and speeches and trying to find time to get all the work done before the weekend and also taking the time to do my weekly review. That can certainly be a challenge. Be a challenge sometimes. But as you say, it's so important and it's a keystone habit of GTD and it makes sense afterwards. So that's part of the motivation for me to pick it up and get it done.

Morten: It's like, I think everyone, I don't know about you, but I think most people have kind of like a book author in their stomach waiting to come out. And we would all like to have done a book in the past. The hard work in the middle there is something we may not want to do, but you would like to have done it in the past. And the same goes for weekly reviews, that when you're done, you're really happy you did it. And, uh, but you can't just wish it to happen. It's, it's, you have to sit down and make it happen.

Lars: Yeah.

Morten: And, and the rewards you get, I remember when I started with GGT back in 2006, is I remember this very vividly because I started Emptying my head was one of the first things, you know, keystone habit number 1 to start with. And then keystone habit number 2 is to get really into the reflect. And I remember what it makes me when you start emptying your head, you feel like a fresh breeze, breathe or breath or wind through your head going, "Ah, I can think again." This, "Oh, I like this." And then to make sure that you're on top of your game, the weekly review is absolutely necessary. Necessary for feeling you're on top of your game. And I remember when I started getting that nailed down, started doing the weekly review, I felt the same feeling of overview and control and relax. It was easier to relax after because I knew there was nothing slipping here. I had control of everything. I felt like, okay, I'm in control of this and now weekend can come and I can relax and and really do what I need to do without my work moving into my brain. So when we tell you it's hard work, know that the reward is 10 times better than the work. You know, it feels so good. It feels so good after. I can't think one Friday or one week without the, the, the, the review or reflect time.

Lars: Yeah, I can recognize that. And especially for me, I think the ability to, yeah, to, to, to feel in control in the way that it enabled me to disconnect and not trying to hold on to everything, knowing that everything was in my system. I think that was one of the critical things, uh, things for me. So when I— one of the things that attracted me to GTD was my struggle with trying to get stuff out of my head and, and stop thinking about work all the time, really trying to, you know, leave your, your brain at the office, or at least make it be quiet about office stuff when, when not at the office. And the weekly review was just such a major shift in how that worked for me, especially over the weekend. So I would do it on a Friday on my way home from work in Copenhagen on my way to Odense. That's about 2 hours by train and bike and walking and all that. And my ability to stay present with friends and family over the weekend when I had done my weekly review on the train back home was just such a huge game changer, really being able to stay And also, you know, so much easier to come back to work Monday knowing that you are, well, first of all, more well-rested because you enjoyed your weekend more, but also that your lists were ready. They were ready to work from. You knew what was showing up in your calendar on Monday. There were no surprises. That really made a big difference for me as well.

Morten: Yeah, exactly. I have the same feeling. The GTD methodology has one core principle, is your head is great having ideas and being creative and problem solving with, but not as a system to hold the result of all your thinking there. So we start with emptying our heads with capture. And if you capture everything that has your attention and then later sit down and decide what they mean to you and what you need to do about them, if anything, and then park the result of this thinking into a system, then you have a system that you have to look at on a regular basis to make sure it's maintained in a good fashion, you feel comfortable that you're making meaningful progress on the most important things. You have to calibrate your map to make sure it's, you know, looks like you want the future to look like. If you don't take time to reflect, then things will start moving to your head again, which is not what you want. If you don't look at your lists on a regular basis, you will start not, you know, can I trust this? Is this up to date? Have I lost something? Is something changed that I don't remember? And this nagging feeling that something is not, I don't know, Americans would call it hunky-dory or something. If you don't trust your system to be up to date, you don't feel comfortable about them. And they will start— things inside them will start nagging you. And this is what we're trying to avoid, that you can actually be present in the weekend with no work-related things invading your brain, unless you wanted to. If you said, well, I want to reflect on this, or I want to think about this problem we have in work, if you want. But the idea with the weekly review, the reflect time that we take, is to make sure that you can you can make that qualified decision if you want to think about work or not. Not work invading your brain when you're playing with your kid or out with your friends or having a romantic dinner with your better half. That is more well spent if you're present, not in the office. Wouldn't you agree?

Lars: Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think I'm reminded that David shared an analogy at some point where he said that the Weekly Review is like, you know, an artist cleaning their, their paintbrushes. You know, you have to do that on a regular basis, otherwise you won't be able to, to paint properly in the, in the weeks to come. So I think that, that analogy really resonated well with, with me.

Morten: Okay, so, so how do we clean our brushes metaphorically? So should we walk through the checklist for a weekly review just to give people an idea what this is?

Lars: I think that makes sense. So the first sort of section or the first part is to get clear. And that means to capture all the stuff that might have wandered out of your, you know, into your bag or out on your desks all over your office and where stuff might gather and really get that back to your inbox for processing. And then we process that inbox to zero, any inboxes that you need to get down to zero and also empty your head. If there's anything that has shown up during the week that you you didn't yet have time to think through or capture, well, now you have a chance to do that. So that was also one of the key things for me in this Weekly Review was a habit to set up, but also was sort of a safety net for me to have to capture things that I might have missed. So that was one step in the Weekly Review process where I knew I would be able to capture those things. You want to grab the second section?

Morten: Yeah, you covered Get Clear, and the second section is called Get Current. You will then look at all your Next Actions lists, your lists with, uh, um, of your next actions, mark off the completed ones, and see if it's complete. If you need to add further actions for your projects, maybe you want to add it. And then you have to look at your previous calendar data. Look in your calendar maybe 2-3 weeks back in time and see if there's something you missed. You go, oh, this meeting, oh, I forgot I should send this email. And well, it's well time spent going back and just slowly reading through your calendar data back in time and then in upcoming, in maybe 1, 2, 3 weeks in the future, maybe you will not be challenged by your boss because you come to a meeting you're not prepared to have. Maybe it's a good thing. Continuing on Get Current, you would maybe want to review your Waiting For list. Make sure that the things you're waiting for are under control. If something, some of them need follow-up, or if you have done them, or you received, you may want to check off the received ones. And then you would like to review your project lists. Make sure that it's up to date, up to snuff. If something is finished, you can archive it. You want to make sure that everything is up to speed. Make sure that you have next actions for all your projects so you move them forward. And then review any relevant checklist you might have for routine work. Make sure that to see if there's something new you would like to add or to make sure that they are relevant still. So that is get current. Would you do the last one?

Lars: Yeah, sure. And just to, to reflect on the calendar review, that was one of the things that really helped me. So, so exactly like you described, to capture something that you might have missed during the week. I see that also and hear that from people who attend our seminars that they, yeah, that, that, that could really be a beneficial habit to implement because they, there is always something that shows up where they didn't have time to do that meeting. So giving them a space during each week to catch those things, that's, that's really valuable for them.

Morten: Yeah. Yeah. And just, just one thing is that sometimes your work, even though you're really good at GTD, you've done GTD for many years, you feel like you have a black, black belt with 3 stripes. You still sometimes have a week where you move really fast and sometimes things slip even for the better, the best one of us, you know, even David Allen needs to do a weekly review at some point and needs to look at his calendar to make sure there's nothing slipping. So sometimes you move really fast and this is a catch-up time.

Lars: Yeah, exactly. So we've done, we've done get clear, we've done get current, and the last part is get creative with the last 2 of the 11 steps. So first one of those is to review your someday, maybe lists to make sure that there's nothing on there. So now you have a good overview of all the things you are actively working on. You know your calendar, you have an understanding, as we will talk about in, in, in the engage step also, of how much unplanned work should you, for example, leave room for in your calendar based on what you know about your work. And then you can take all that into consideration and see, well, if there's something on my someday/maybe list that I might want to, want to trigger, then now is perhaps the time to to enable that project. And the last one is to simply just give yourself space to really think the big thoughts. Now you have the complete overview of everything in your life that you might want to throw yourself at and consider, well, if there's something even bigger that you want to start chasing.

Morten: Yes. When I give my seminars and coaching, I said that get creative there, that's optional. But you need to review some of the maybe lists to see if there is room for something or something's become more more relevant now than it was before. But creative and courageous is a natural, it follows naturally when you get everything under control, you get more creative, you become more courageous. So, and this is good. So should we say something? I feel the need to say something about the need to do all of this. Like, do you really need to do all of these every week? Well, that's a long list. 11 points there.

Lars: Yes, yes.

Morten: I don't have time for this, Lars. What do I do?

Lars: Well, you might pick some. So better to do a small review than none at all, for sure. So pick the ones that would make the most sense if you don't have time to do a full one. So do a scan of your calendar or get to the bottom of an inbox, for example. But really, you also don't want to miss this too many times because it will be that much bigger the next week. So I really try to dive into as many of them as I possibly can. But building on what you said on the someday maybe list, for example. So that's part of the customization that I've done to my GTD system was to take some of the projects that I knew I did not have to review on a weekly basis and then place them on a separate list. So I actually, I always check my someday maybe list, but it's really a small subset of the total and complete set of lists that I could be reviewing. Considered someday maybe. What do you do?

Morten: Well, I've made customization for this list. I've rearranged the order of it to make it more me. And I think this is, you know, D2D is not religion. It's a format where you can look at your commitments and how do you relate to them. How can you be appropriately engaged with with your commitments. And for me, this is— I had to change some of this, made the order different because it made more sense for my head. And I also, of course, put aside— I make a calendar appointment for me on the time where I want to do it for me personally. And I want to stress, this is very highly personal. You may want to do it on another day. I know people do it on Saturdays, Mondays, Wednesdays, at night, in the morning. You do it when it makes sense to you, but you must remember that when you do your reflect time once a week, the weekly review, you must make sure that you have a lot, or, you know, as much mental energy as you can have to make sure you really— because this is heavy mental lifting. It's like heavy, heavy lifts by your mind muscles. And I remember when I tried to do this the first time, I put it on, you know, I did it in the afternoon and that was really heavy for me because then I was tired. I didn't have the mental horsepower to do this. So make sure you do it on a time and a day Sorry, a day at a time of the day where you have mental energy. This is really important. I can't stress this enough. So, um, but, um, for me it's 9 to, uh, 10:30 on Fridays. You won't get me, you won't find me anywhere. And why? It's because I turn off all notifications, I silence my phone, and, and you will not get my attention for 1.5 hours. Sometimes I make it for half an hour because I don't have time or I have to move my allotted time a little, but I still want to do it on the same day if at all possible. It makes it a lot easier, make sure I can then get through it. I can make it a light version, Every now and then when things slow down, like we are getting closer at this recording, we are getting closer to vacation time, and I know that in the vacation time I don't need an hour and a half. Maybe I'll need 45 minutes just to make sure everything is on track, nothing is slipping. And in the middle of the vacation time, maybe I just need 15 minutes to look to my calendar to make sure everything is okay. But so how do you— when do you do yours, Lois?

Lars: I do it basically at the same time. Perhaps I I stole your time slot as well. It's a Friday. Yeah, typically at 9, around 9 o'clock to get it done. And it really varies how much time it takes for me to get through because it depends so much on how many active projects I have right now. How has my week looked? Has it been full of seminars and speeches or has it been a slow week? Then maybe I can do a quicker review. So it really, really varies a lot. But I would move on to perhaps talking about some of the habits that might help you establish this, because I think that's, that's some of the things that really helped me get this, you know, into something that I would automatically do every week. And, you know, like, like brushing your teeth every day, every twice a day, that, you know, it's a habit to do. And if it feels wrong if you haven't done it, getting that same kind of feeling when you think of the weekly review and you haven't done it. That habits really helped for me in that way. So we always recommend this to make it your own. And you already touched on this, Morten, how you have made it your own. I have certainly also customized mine. I've kept the standard steps as we walked through them now. But I have a lot of other things that I have built on top of this. So reviews of my calendar or see if I have enough time to do my running practice, see if I have time to visit my grandmother. And also just checklists in general that you mentioned. One of the things that worked well for me was to have a checklist with things that I knew I wanted to do every week. So that I had to do and I would not put them anywhere else. So I really had to get into a weekly review mode to get those lists out. So I knew that if I didn't do them, then I would not get paid, for example, if that was on the list. So really putting some critical stuff in there. That just made it so much more easy for me to say, yes, I have to, I have to do this and all the other steps. I know it's beneficial for me. So that was a good trick for me. What about you?

Morten: No, I, I've done some what we call customization. One of the things that I always build in is I have a little reward is that, that I never let myself have without when I'm doing the weekly review to make it attractive to me. Like I make, I usually tell I make a cappuccino with, sorry, a cocoa with double espresso inside, a lot of brown sugar. Now I'm on ginger tea with a lot of sugar and some organic honey, which makes it really sweet and nice. And maybe some sweets on the side like chocolate or something. I never indulge in these things elsewise, but this time I do when it comes to making sure I'm not distracted, making sure I'm on the track, making me little rewards while we go. That helps me a lot. Just want to ask you, with our weekly review, we talk about we do this once a week, but One of the things I found is necessary for making sure that you are having a good weekly review is not wait on doing a little review every day. And with the review, I mean, get your inboxes to zero, clarify and organize your emails on a regular basis. So make sure that your backlog is not too big because I know that if you have a big backlog, weekly review could be really daunting to start on. And you might slip back into your old habits where you don't do a weekly review and you don't empty your emails. What is your experience on this?

Lars: Yes, I've heard the exact same thing. So for example, when people have their weekly review on Friday mornings like both you and I do, then perhaps they need to schedule if they have a big inbox, if they see that this week is full of meetings, I don't have time to get to the bottom of it, well then maybe schedule some time Thursday afternoon to, to get to the bottom. So you only have to, to catch up with the stuff that has shown up since then, because that can certainly take up a lot of the, the weekly review time. So that's certainly a good habit to, yeah, to consider at least.

Morten: Yeah. So should we try and sum this up by saying, start by saying that you should reflect as much as you need to during the week to make sure you have an overview and control, but you have to really reflect once a week. We call that the GTD Weekly Review to make sure that you stay on top of your game. You're not buried by— I don't have the overview feeling. And can you just walk us through the, the steps again real quickly, just the overview maybe?

Lars: Yeah, sure. So, so the weekly review is 11 steps. First part is to get clear, and that's to collect all the loose papers and materials and get that into your inbox and then get get those inboxes to zero. And last part of Get Clear is to empty your head. Then we get current. We want to run through the system and the calendar to, to make sure that we know what's in there, that we have everything set up, everything is ready to, to run. So we want to review the Next Actions list. We want to review previous calendar data and upcoming calendar data. We want to review the Waiting For checklist and also the project list to make sure that everything is that is on there is active and everything has a next action and possibly the larger outcome comes as well if you have worked more with the Horizons of Focus. And the last part of the Get Current step is to review any relevant checklists. And last but not least, we have the Get Creative part where you review your Someday/Maybe list, and the last one, Be Creative and Courageous, to really think the, the bigger things as needed.

Morten: Okay, so, and, um, the format should be as long as you need it to be, a day where you have enough mental energy and time of day where you have enough mental energy. And one thing we haven't mentioned is the necessity of being undisturbed. So one of the things I would highly recommend people is to go off the radar, go somewhere where you can be undisturbed by your colleagues who wanted to ask you of something, then just get off the grid. Go for a cafe or find a meeting room and have a meeting with yourself, or go home, stay at home, do this at home if you don't have children at home, that is, or a wife at home. That may be making it difficult, but a place where you can be undisturbed, and make sure you are undisturbed by turning off all notifications so that you can highly concentrate on this. That is, I highly suggest that. That's a good, good thing.

Lars: That's a great tip.

Morten: Yeah. So, um, anything to add for this?

Lars: No, there's, you know, as, as usual with the other steps, there are so many more things we could dive into, but I think starting with these, you know, initial episodes of the podcast and trying to give people an overview, I think we covered, covered all the basics.

Morten: And so, so if I was going to try and do this, what's in it for me? What's my reward for doing this Keystone Habit?

Lars: Well, your reward is to get a clear mind, obviously, and get an overview and really trusting that your system is ready to go. And then, as I mentioned earlier, for me was the ability to disconnect.

Morten: Exactly. So if you want to disconnect, you want to feel you have the overview and control and mastery of your life and work. I think the GTD weekly review is really a good habit to establish to obtain this and maintain that state. Okay, good. This, I think, has been a good episode, a little longer than we normally would. We are closing in on half an hour, but I think it has been good. So Lars, would you take us to goodbye?

Lars: Sure. Well, before we leave, we always just mention where you can find more about this. Nordic.com. You will find links to all of the websites across the Nordics. You can also find there on each of those sites the Facebook groups, the LinkedIn groups, the GTD meetup groups, all the, the relevant GTD communities on the various platforms and how you can get in touch with us, etc. And as mentioned, we hope that you find these episodes valuable. And if you do, then we'd really appreciate if you share the podcast with a friend or a colleague and rate the podcast on iTunes.

Morten: Okay, thank you. Well, thank you for listening, and this has been an interesting episode, I hope, for you. And until next time, have a great week and days. May they be productive.

Lars: Thanks everyone, bye-bye. Bye-bye.