This is episode four, on Step Four of the Workflow Diagram / Map, Reflect (Review), in our nine-part series on the Getting Things Done (GTD) personal productivity methodology and eponymously-titled book, from the perspective of the ProductivityCast team–as long-term practitioners, critics and observers of GTD.

“[...O]ne of the requirements it that you have to come back and reflect and review on your system and care and feed it and make sure that it stays current."

"See a lot of the value of Getting Things Done methodology is being able to offload off your psyche the job of remembering and reminding. In order to do that though, you can’t fool your own mind. It knows whether or not you’ve looked at what you need to look at as often as you need to look at it and if you’re not doing that, that’s not just the weekly review, but if you’re not looking daily at your calendar and you know you need to, then some part of you is gonna be bothered by that all the time."

~David Allen (Source)

In this cast, we cover the concept of Reflect (formerly Review) on your system on a frequency and in methods that work for you, so that you can iterate on your productivity and make strategic next action decisions as your life and work circumstances change.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://productivitycast.net/042 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

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In this Cast | Reflect - Getting Things Done (GTD)

Ray Sidney-Smith

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | Reflect - Getting Things Done (GTD)

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life by David Allen

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman

Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin

Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

Evernote

OneNote

Journey

Day One

IFTTT

Raw Text Transcript | Reflect - Getting Things Done (GTD)

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00

Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity here. Your hosts Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

Welcome everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity. I'm recently Smith, and I'm joined here this morning with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Good morning gentlemen,

Francis Wade 0:27

morning.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28

Good day, good day to you all. And Good day, to our listeners, wherever you might be listening from today, we are going to be talking about getting things done. This has been in a series of episodes where we've been discussing getting things done the art of stress, free productivity by David Allen, and really having a conversation around each of the fundamental components of the GTD methodology. And so we are going to be talking about reviewing and reflecting. So in the first edition of getting things done back in 2001, David Allen called this stage reviewing. And I think it created a number of different confusions for people. And in the march 2015 edition, actually, subsequent in the 2011, making it all workbook, he changed the terminology to reflecting. And then in getting things done in the march 2015 edition, pe changed the term to reflecting. So reflecting is what we're going to be talking about today. And what we're gonna do is we're going to co define or at least talk about the differences in which we see reflecting as a fundamental function of our own productivity systems. Then we're going to talk about how each of us really implements this concept, the skill of reflecting in our own systems, because we, we went from the capture process, we then clarify that information, and then organized it. And now this is that point where things are on our lists, they're in our calendars, they're saved as reference material. And now we need to do something with those things. Who wants to start us off with defining reflecting in your own way, how do you how do you all define reflecting,

Francis Wade 2:18

it's actually a function of the way you have your tasks organized. So if you have them organized in lists, then reflecting is about checking in a different point to today to make sure that you are working on the best possible task at any point in time. So you're it requires going back in

making sure that you're looking at the best possible list based on context, choosing, choosing the right context, going through the items that are belong to that context, and then making sure that you're executing the best possible one. So there's this if you have lists, and lots of less than it requires this kind of recursive kind of checking, completing the action checking completing, If, however, you you don't, don't necessarily follow his prescription, which I don't, and you set up a plan for the day, which is detailed and you have reminders, then the checking checking isn't as important they're reviewing the reviewing actually just happens once in the morning, and then you're following a plan for the day and you want to revisit your plan, if the there's disruption to the original plan. So I think it depends on the tools that you use, if you're using lots of lists, lots of reflecting, if you're not using lots of lists, then you can reflect once or twice per day,

my take

Art Gelwicks 3:47

See, I look at reflecting a little bit differently. Because I look at it more as a bigger picture aspect of this, when you take you go down the path of reviewing that's a detail level. But reflecting is more if I use analogy, if you were standing by like, say, a lake and looking at the surface of the water, the reflection that you're seeing of everything around, you can get this great idea of what's around. But nothing's entirely in razor sharp focus, and you're not trying to get it in razor sharp focus, you're just trying to get the overall feel as to what everything you're viewing. And when I think about reflecting on what I have within my system, it's is are the things that I'm doing taking me in the directions that I ultimately want to be going or need to be going not down to a specific step one, step two, step three. But the larger paths involved is am I going in the right professional direction, am I going in the right personal direction.

I know it's more of a touchy feely kind of approach. But that's the way I view the term because it helps me wrap my head around how this fits in as whether that's an hourly or a daily or a weekly thing. For me, it's, it's kind of an item of need, when I'm doing something, if I just kind of my spider sense, tingles a little bit says is this doesn't feel right, I have to back up and look at it a little bit and say, okay, is everything still going in the right directions? Yep. Okay, I'll figure out what's wrong, then move from there

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:20

is something that I always think about when it comes to reflecting is that the reviews skill itself needs to be split among as you were talking about art, you know, kind of the higher level stuff and then what Francis was talking about which was the more granular what's happening today, stuff I consider if you're doing any, any level of hourly or daily reflecting that is the that is the short spurt, very quick review. So I consider those short reviews. And then the long review or long Taylor reviews happened on the monthly, quarterly and annually. And then David Allen, of course, has created this structure. This methodology he he's termed as the weekly review. And for listeners, we'll be doing an entire episode on the weekly review. Since it's such a big topic, we're going to do an entire episode on that. So we're actually going to act like the weekly review doesn't exist here in this episode today. And we're going to talk about the other ways in which we implement reviewing and consider it that way. But many years ago, I read a book called 18 minutes by Peter Bregman and what Bregman offered was this concept of spending 18 minutes a day, preparing for checking in and reflecting on Wednesday. And so you took five minutes in the morning, a minute at each hour of the day of an eight hour day, and then five minutes at the end of the day. And that's where the 18 minutes comes from. And I really liked the idea of it. So I, of course, develop my own system, my own method for for checking in hourly throughout my day. And it actually happens now every half hour throughout the day. And so every 25 and 55 of the hour, I actually go ahead and have a have a timer that actually goes off if I'm not in a meeting, or if I'm you know, not focused on something exclusively, then this little timer, of course, just has me check in so that I can make sure that I'm focused and staying on track with regard to the things that I want to be doing. And not everyone is really built for this.