The Weekly Review

To mark the occasion of the 100th episode, James and Jean talk about our favorite moments and accomplishments, and talk about new ideas for our second hundred episodes.

Some stats so far:

Episodes mentioned:

1: My Whole House Is An Inbox

8: The Usual Monkey Wrench

16: The Unbearable Lightness of OmniFocus Bankruptcy

19: That’s Too Devious, Jean

20: Organizationiversary

21: A Day Without A Dot 🎉

33: On The Hunt For The Perfect To-Do List App, with Special Guest Aleen Simms

35: James Is My Trusted System

39: A Very Long Story, with Special Guest Rosemary Orchard

41: Productivity + Fun = PodCon 2 in Seattle

42: Life, The Universe, and What’s In Our Junk Drawers

47: The Time Sensitive Micro Project

52: Emailiversary

54: A Very Tasty Pepper, with Special Guest Ish ShaBazz

69: The Odyssey of the Ford Taurus

87: Reviewing Our 2020 Calendar Strategies, with Special Guest David Sparks

92: Cat Bombed, with Special Guest Dexter

94: The Clean Slate

In this episode the topics range from the practical to the fanciful. James and Jean revisit the notion of a clean slate. James has begun thinking about his weekly review as a way to start with a clean slate which has been helpful motivation in the past few weeks. In more fanciful matters, Jean and James talk about desired superpowers and James contends that a common inspirational phrase is a load of hooey. Finally, the winner of the “When will James Do His Next Weekly Review?” contest is announced!

James announces that he has completed a weekly review after a spell of not doing one (while being otherwise productive). We talk about how it feels to get that done, why it took this long, and what lessons we can learn about getting back on track. We also discuss about how tags and flags can be a help or a distraction in tackling our tasks in OmniFocus.

This episode Jean talks about progress on her proposal to add a guinea pig emoji, including the emoji proposal process and some details from the reasearch Jean has done so far. Using this particular project as an example, Jean and James talk about how their trusted system might help them to get things done, but doesn’t necessarly help you get things done early or ahead of a deadline.

Thanks to an email from a listener, Jean did a weekly review this week on the theory that it’s better to do a shoddy one than not to do one at all. James is still getting things done, but a full weekly review is still on his list. (Which means the contest to guess which week James does a review is still on. Details below.)

Send us an email at [email protected] with the subject “Weekly Review Week Guess” and pick the Sunday of the week that you think James will actually complete a full weekly review. The correct guess will score something fun from the many cool pop culture tchotchkes at his house.

Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+ and more. With the proliferation of streaming services, home entertainment has become more complex. In this episode Jean and James talk about their streaming subscriptions including strategies to keep from breaking the entertainment budget. Also, Jean moves to the next iCloud storage tier and James wonders if he should dump Hulu and watch Picard instead.

App for tracking subscriptions:

Inspired by an article by J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly, Jean and James talk about the appealing concept of starting with a clean slate. The conversation covers a range of variations on the clean slate theme—from hotel rooms that contain only what you’ve brought on a trip, to declaring OmniFocus bankruptcy and starting again, to the thought that a weekly review is a way of getting to a clean slate state, without starting from scratch every time. Plus, a movie pitch and a sure-fire idea for an app.

The clean slate

This week, we ask the question: how exactly did our parents manage their tasks? Both James and Jean have parents who held jobs, raised children, got advanced degrees, and successfully retired without the benefit of OmniFocus or GTD. We reminisce about what organizational strategies we remember from our childhoods, how our parents’ examples influenced us, and how life was simpler back then.

In this episode Jean and James set out to talk about including follow-up tasks in projects to make sure loose ends are tied up. But James‘ friend Dexter the cat has other plans and becomes an unexpected special guest. James coaxes him to share some of his feline organizational tips while other topics range from some OmniFocus wishlist items to unexpected trips.

Our contest is still on:

We start off this year answering a listener question about when and why to use Due versus Omnifocus for reminders. James confesses he still hasn’t done his weekly review and talks about why he is okay with that, while Jean flies under the radar and doesn’t even mention her weekly review (which she hasn’t done either). We wrap up with some travel hacking tips and then James surprises us all by offering prizes for guessing which week he will do that weekly review.