The Tutorials of Doit.im for iPhone Part Ⅳ: Review
We have already introduced the skills needed to make a full use of Doit.im for iPhone in the earlier tutorials. In this chapter, we will focus on how to review your tasks, the GTD way.
There are three major steps to reviewing.
Daily Review: Review Today and Next tasks every day so that you can know what you need to do today.
Weekly Review: Review Projects and Scheduled tasks every week so that you can adjust or rearrange some of your actions in case of unforeseen events.
Periodic Review: Review your dreams listed in Someday so that they can be converted into actions, moved to Next.
The purpose of the whole method of GTD is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to make the best of the existing resources and work more productively. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must be engaged in the current work. You must be sure that you’re doing what you need to be doing, and that it’s OK to be not doing what you’re not doing. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for absolute control of all the things in your system.
Have you ever taken the following questions into consideration?
1、When is the best time to review your tasks? What do you need to focus on now?
2、What should you do when reviewing?
Reviewing should trigger consistent and appropriate evaluation of your life and work at several horizons. A real review process will lead to enhanced and proactive new thinking in key areas of your life and work.
Now, let’s review your tasks in Doit.im for iPhone.
Here, we provide you with a method for reviewing, which may be not suitable for everyone, it’s just for your reference.
Daily Review
First, you need to review Today in Doit.im for iPhone, which can be done in the morning before you sit down to do something. This way, you can know what you have to do today. You need to know the time-and-space parameters. Knowing that you have wall-to-wall meetings from 8:00 A.M through 6:00 P.M., for example, with barely a half-hour break for lunch, will help you make necessary decisions about any other activities.
After you review your day- and time-specific tasks and arrange them properly, your next area for review will be the lists of all the actions you could possibly do in your current context. If you are in your office, for instance, you will look at your lists of calls, computer actions, and in-office things to do. It does not necessarily mean you must finish all the actions on those lists. Actually, you’ll just make the best choices about what to deal with according to your time and energy. You need to feel confident so that you don’t miss anything critical. For example, after completing all tasks in the morning, you find that there are still ten minutes left. Ten minutes is enough for you to make calls, and you can open your task list under Phone.
If you have done today’s tasks or you think you still have extra time for other tasks, you can review your Next box to make sure if there are actions that you have to do today.If there are, you can move them to Today. If you decide that the action should be done at another time, you can put it into Tomorrow and Scheduled. For example, after discussing with your colleague, you decide to submit your plan on the New Year’s event tomorrow, but you still need to modify it this evening. In this case, you can move the task of “Modify the plan of the New Year event” from Next to Today.
Actually, if you do well with time arrangement and keep up with your reviews, then the Today box may be the only box in Doit.im for iPhone you will need to refer to regularly. Because you will find there is not enough time for other tasks asit has already been a big challenge for you just to finish all the tasks in Today.
If you’re like most other people, no matter how good your intentions may be, you still find that you cannot keep up with the world, because it changes much faster than expected. Many of us seem to have it in our nature toconstantly entangle ourselves in more than we have the ability to handle. Under such circumstances, Weekly Review becomes more valuable. It helps you re-evaluate, and reprocess your time to keep you in balance and makes you recapture the initiative of your life. Weekly Review will also sharpen your intuitive focus on your important work or goals so that you won’t lose your life direction.
Very simply, Weekly Review is whatever you need to do to get your head empty again. It’s going through the five phases of workflow management-collecting, processing, organizing, and reviewing all your outstanding involvements-until you can confidently say, “I absolutely know right now everything I’m not doing but could be doing if I decided to.”
Here is the drill that we think can help you reach an efficient Weekly Review.
1、Review any journal entries, meeting notes, or miscellaneous notes scribbled on notebook paper. List action items and add them into Inbox, Scheduled, Someday…
Be strict with yourself, processing all notes and thoughts relative to interactions, work, new initiatives, new information, and purging those not needed.
2、Review past calendar dates in detail for remaining action items. Generally, they are displayed in the Today list in Doit.im for iPhone, marked with “…d overdue” if they also have expired Deadlines. Under them, dates in red are shown in order to tell you that you didn’t complete them in time. You need to transfer them into the active system in Doit.im for iPhone. You can move overdue tasks in Today to Scheduled, Tomorrow or some other boxes so that you can complete them one by one. For instance, “Discuss with my boss about the plan of next month” is an overdue task in the following screenshot. You can set Today as its Start Time again and at this time, it is marked with “due” by default as long as you don’t change its Deadline. Then you need to spare some time to finish it in this afternoon without any further delay.
3、Look at future calendar events (long- and short-term). They are usually listed in Scheduled. Capture actions about arrangements and preparations for any upcoming events.
4、Empty your head. Put in writing (in Doit.im for iPhone) any new projects, action items, waitings, someday/maybes, and so forth that you haven’t yet captured.
5、Review the projects list. Evaluate the status of projects, goals, and outcomes one by one, ensuring that there is no project left out, especially inactive projects on Doit.im for iPhone. You should know clearly if it is the right time to activate the inactive projects.
6、Review the Next list. Mark off completed actions, reviewing the actions to do and putting them into Scheduled.
7、Review the Waiting list. Record appropriate actions for any needed follow-up. Check off received items.
8、Review the Someday list. Check for any tasks that may have become active and move them to other boxes. Delete tasks no longer of interests, moving them into Trash.
9、Collect creative ideas. Are there any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas you can add to Doit.im for iPhone?
The last review we need to do is Periodic Review, which will make your dreams into an action list that you can do and complete.
Periodic Review
List your dreams in Someday so that you can realize them when the time comes. You can convert them into the next actions. Then you will get closer to your dreams and they will finally come true.
Now please open your Someday box in Doit.im for iPhone. “Learn to ski” attracts your attention, for it is just the right season. Aha! You can achieve it! You can make a plan for it, thinking about the process of learning how to ski. The first thing you need to do is to buy a ski outfit, which can be added into Next with no hesitation. Do you think you are much closer to your dream now? :)
So far, we have talked about all the content for Review. If there is anything new, we will update it soon, and we hope we will have the chance to communicate with each other. The key point we will emphasize in the next chapter is how to do your tasks inDoit.im for iPhone.