Nothing Undone

I guess you have to fail a few times before you learn anything.

I started practicing GTD five years ago. I’ve probably fallen off the wagon about four times. Every time I get better, and every time it feels worse not to hove a complete picture of my commitments. It makes life so easy. But you have to keep it current. This time, I’ve figured out how to do that.

A GTD system is useful, but it’s just a tool, and it’s not intelligent. It won’t stay current on its own. Without reviewing your lists regularly, they become stale and useless.

Trouble is, most people think that the Weekly Review is a much bigger deal than it had to be. At least I did. And if you think it’s going to be a huge burden, why would you put yourself through that? Once you recognize how simple it can be, and feel what a relief it is to complete, you’ll be itching to do it every week.

Trying to Get too much Done.

When I first read about the Weekly Review in Getting Things Done, I thought David Allen was describing a huge undertaking. I got that I should be doing all of these things:

1. Collecting every scrap of anything that’s out of place.
2. Processing all of it.
3. Looking over every project and action.
4. Performing a mind sweep and processing that.
5. Looking over a series of checklists.
6. Thinking about what I accomplished this week.
7. Reflecting on my goals and larger outcomes, and my progress towards them.

I thought all this was necessary every week, and I tried to do everything. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to set aside dedicated time every week to review, especially at first. One hour is about all I can manage. This took me two or three, and I never finished. It’s hard to keep trying to do something hard when you keep failing. Eventually I gave up.

And then I figured out how to make it work.

The 1-step GTD weekly review.

Here are the steps to a successful Weekly Review.

1. Look at all the stuff on your lists.

That’s it. Look, you know what you’re committed to doing and what you’re not. You know what’s out of place and out of date. Just look. Look over everything, line by line, and see if anything is wrong. If a project is complete, mark it complete. If you’ve given up on it, cross it off, or throw it in Someday/Maybe. If a project needs a new Next Action, come up with one. If the current Next Action’s wrong, change it. Just look, and everything will be obvious.

Yeah, it would be great to do a brain sweep and to pull in loose papers from all over the house and to meditate on the past week and to think about your goals and all kinds of stuff. But this? Looking over your list of commitments and making sure it’s accurate? This is hard enough. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Holding my ground.

Personally, this is all I can handle in my Weekly Review right now, and it’s enough to keep me current and let my system be useful. Now that I’m getting through all of my inboxes once a day and staying current once a week, I’m feeling like I’m in complete control, and the longer I hold this ground, the more natural it feels. It’s becoming a real habit.

Once this feels easy to me, I’ll start incorporating more things into my review. But for now, this is enough. Not realizing that has caused my systems to fall apart two or three times already. Now, five years into my GTD practice, I feel like I’m finally starting to do GTD.

What does that even mean? Let me see if I can break it down a bit.

Do we think rationally? Absolutely. We make logical connections and deductions incredibly well.

Are our decisions, at their root, based on logic? No, because that would be nonsensical.

Logic connects facts to other facts. We can use logic to make deductions. For instance: in order to eat a cheeseburger, I will first have to order the cheeseburger. Then, I’ll have to put it in my mouth. I have not decided to do these things because of logic, I simply have deduced that they are necessary to eat my dinner.

I have decided to eat dinner. Specifically, I have decided that I have decided to eat a cheeseburger. I have decided this because cheeseburgers are tasty, and I am hungry. These reasons are not “rational”; I posit that no reason can be. They are axiomatic. Logic does dictate what is true; it only arrives at what must be true given a system of assumed facts.

We tend to call a decision “rational” when it is farther down the logic chain, and we care about it only indirectly. For instance, Ramit Sethi asks in comment 13 of his post on tax refunds:

“Do you really think people are rational robots and will invest their extra money each month?”

Investing regularly is not inherently a good idea. It’s only smart for someone who wants to save money. If you don’t have an irrational desire for money or something to which money is a means (such as eating), there’s no reason to invest. We say it is “rational” because it is not directly appealing. It’s only appealing because it helps us achieve something else which we desire.

I would say that we have two minds, or two facilities of mind: think-mind and feel-mind. Think-mind makes inferences and deductions. Feel-mind makes decisions.

Let’s say I have decided to get married—which, along with my fiancée, I have. My feel-mind made the decision. It visualized a wedding and being married and living with my now-girlfriend for the rest of my life. That felt good.

Then my think-mind’s job started. We have a lot of work to do: we have caterers to call and invitations to send. My think-mind can deduce what is necessary to satisfy my feel-mind. When I do these things, am I acting rationally? I am acting in accordance with logic, assuming I want to get married. My desire to get married, however, is simply my desire. Or, to look more deeply, it is a logical deduction from my desires to spend the rest of my life with my fiancée, to save money on taxes, and to have a big party.

Now here’s where I think it gets interesting.

I’ve got a whole bunch of tasks and projects to get through to make this wedding happen. All of these things have to get done in order to have this wedding. Everything is listed on my Project list, and the next actions for those projects are on my Action lists. Call caterer to get prices. Look up phone number for tent rental. Simple, physical actions. Now I simply have to do them.

But when I’m at work and I look at my list of calls to make, I see that task, and I don’t call. Because I don’t care. My think-mind doesn’t make decisions; my feel-mind does, and my feel-mind has forgotten why I’m making this call. If it remembered that I’m calling because I need the prices to set the budget to serve the food to have the party to celebrate the fact that I’m officially spending my life with my favorite person in the world, I’d be all over it.

But I forget that. All I see is this task in isolation: “Call caterer to get prices”. Ugh. I’d rather check my email.

The more I can capture the connection between what my feel-mind likes and what my think-mind says it implies, the easier it is to remember why I want to do these things. So I try to make my Projects be things I really want. When I can see why I wanted to do the things I said I wanted to do, I decide to do them more of the time. That means I keep my promises to myself, and I’m a happier person when I look back on all the things I’ve accomplished each week. It also means that I have a chance of pulling my weight and getting this wedding to happen.