Now that you have created a Personal Management System, you must keep it alive. You must feed and nurture the system, and the best way to do that is to install a consistent, thorough review practice.
You need to be able to review the whole picture of your life and work at appropriate intervals and appropriate levels … This is where you take a look at all your outstanding projects and open loops … on a weekly basis.
David Allen, Getting Things Done
Or, put another way:
We’ve gotta’ get an image or picture in our head, which we call orientation. Then we have to make a decision as to what we’re going to do, and then implement the decision … Then we look at the [resulting] action, plus our observation, and we drag in new data, new orientation, new decision, new action, ad infinitum…
John Boyd
The first half of this article explains how I do that. When reviewing, we will look back at our Personal Leadership efforts (Parts I-IV of this series) to reconnect with our Grand Strategy, values, character strengths, roles, and identities
Need to refresh? Follow these links:
- Part I—From Management to Leadership with Your Personal Credo
- Part II—Exercises & Practices
- Part III—Roles & Identities
- Part IV—The Ultimate Mission & Grand Strategy
- Part V—Personal Management Overview
- Part VI—Basic Workflow to Get Things Done My Way
The second half of this article will be all about planning for the week ahead. First, we get clear and current, next, we get inspired and creative, and then we plan to attack the coming week.
You can adapt and prioritize daily if you plan weekly.
Stephen Covey, First Things First
When?
I have to agree with David Allen here. The review should be done every seven to ten days. Aligning the review with Covey’s weekly planning makes the most sense. For many years in my career, I did a thorough review and planning session every fortnight (14 days, or every 2 weeks) because that fit the pay period schedule. I also used to split this up across two days.
On my work ‘Friday’, I “cleared the decks” (a term I have borrowed not from Allen but from the Navy). This allowed me to go into my weekend ‘clear’ and ‘current.’ Then, on my work ‘Monday,’ I planned my week. I set goals and outcomes for the rest of the week, “securing for sea” and “preparing to get underway,” as we said in the Navy.
Here’s another confession: Early in my career, my review, processing, and planning once a week was the only time I looked at my collection baskets, thoroughly processed them, and organized my system. But that was before I had a cell phone—personal or issued—or a laptop. Sure, we had e-mail, but no Teams, Skype, or any of those teleconferencing apps.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Herbert Simon (1971), quoted in Manage Your Day-to-Day
What I’m saying is the pace of work is probably too fast to do it that way anymore. The fact is, bosses and clients expect you to be constantly connected and available. (This admittedly is a ridiculous notion, but this is an article about productivity, not work-life balance.) You will probably need to process and organize every day. Sorry, but that seems to be the reality now.
How?
‘Deep work.’ I’ve mentioned this before. You need a block of time set aside during which time you’ll be undisturbed by the rest of the world.
Cal Newport defined ‘deep work’ in his succinct book of the same name: “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive abilities to their limit … create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
‘Getting clear’ and ‘getting current’ may not push your cognitive abilities to their limit, but getting creative and planning the week will certainly “create new value”—a value hard to replicate any other way. Regardless, you must practice a “state of distraction-free concentration.”
When you start doing this, it may take some time to get through it. It will take longer if you are not “defining your work”—processing and organizing—regularly. When I was processing, organizing, and reviewing, only one day a week, it could take up to six hours (especially when combined with pay admin tasks). With practice, I got that down to only two.
Getting Clear
This is merely a summary. For a full description, go back to Part VI of this series. Start by collecting all loose papers. Look in briefcases, purses, bags, satchels, coat pockets, and wallets. Also, check any notebooks and paper-based planners.
Next, get “In” to zero. Remember, this does not mean doing everything. Just process it, make decisions, and organize it into your trusted system. This includes the work, home, and mobile inboxes. You should also process electronic inboxes (e-mail, group communication apps) and applications like Notes or Evernote. Don’t forget your voicemail needs processing if you let things collect there.
My checklist includes open tabs in my internet browsers on all devices. Throughout my day, I will think of something I want to look up or research. Often, the quickest way to make a note of it is to open a tab and type the terms into the search bar (although asking “Siri” to look it up for me is starting to become my second favorite way). I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole right now, and I don’t want all the open tabs later.
Like any collection bucket, I go through them and make a decision: do it (if less than two minutes), defer it (organize into my system), delegate it, or delete it. Huge warning here. It is easy to get sucked into the internet. You must stick to making a decision on each item in the collection bucket and organizing it into the system. Then move on to the next collection bucket.
Lastly, empty your head. Get off your mind and onto lists—into your system—every big and little thing you have been ruminating on. Collect it and process it.
Get Current
‘Getting current’ is all about reviewing everything—stem to stern and crow’s nest to bilge. I prefer to start at the highest level. As David Allen says, priorities should drive your choices.
Trying to prioritize activities before you even know how they relate to your sense of personal mission and how they fit into the balance of your life is not effective. You may be prioritizing and accomplishing things you don’t want or need to be doing at all.
Stephen Covey, First Things First
I start with my Grand Strategy, core values and character strengths, maxims and operating principles, and my domain-specific strategies.
Next, I review quarterly, role-based goals and any ‘Training Missions’ I currently have. At this level, I also review any common-placing notebooks and journals back to my last review date.
The last mid-level thing to review is my calendar. I review backwards to the last review: were there any commitments I needed to renegotiate or follow-ups to do? Then look forward to any upcoming commitments and drop-dead dates (due dates with consequences).
Another high-leverage use of your journal and calendar review is to do an 80:20 analysis, a la Tim Ferriss (4-Hour Work Week).
Eighty percent of outcomes are generated by twenty percent of activities.
Kevin Kruse, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management
Citing the Pareto Principle, which states roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, Ferriss encourages us to analyze our past actions and outcomes, and apply the 80:20 rule—eliminate the 20% that is causing 80% of the trouble. Further, most everything in life can be streamlined to the more important few, and make our lives simpler, thus giving us more time to enjoy it.
Ground Level
Now review your next actions list. What’s done or left undone? Check your delegated or ‘waiting for’ list—do you need to check the status with the delegatee or light a fire? Review your projects and the larger outcomes list. Also, don’t forget the incubating and someday-maybe lists—is it time to move something to your active projects list?
All your open loops (i.e., projects), active project plans, and “Next Actions,” “Agendas,” “Waiting For,” and even “Someday-Maybe” lists should be reviewed once a week. This also gives you an opportunity to ensure that your brain is clear and that all the loose strands of the past few days have been collected, processed, and organized.
David Allen, Getting Things Done
Planning
Now that you’ve reviewed everything, you’re clear and current, everything refreshed in the mind—you are ready to get creative and plan your coming week.
Getting to where you’re going requires knowing where you are.
A map is not functional until you know where you are on it. Locating yourself in space and time provides a reference for motion: how much is required and in what direction. Objectively viewing your current reality always reduces confusion and misalignment. Agreement with yourself and others about what’s true right now … is critical for making clear headway.
David Allen, Ready for Anything
The power of weekly planning layered onto a weekly review is a sense of perspective and control. The honest and thorough review tells you where you are on the map and aligns the map with the terrain. The planning gives you a sense of direction and a hand on the tiller.
Agency
Note I said a “sense of control.” It gives you some ‘agency,’ not ‘control.’ There are very few things we have total control over. Still, a sense of agency—the feeling that you can take action, be effective, influence your own life, and assume responsibility for your behavior—is essential to your psychological well-being. This sense of agency influences your capacity for psychological stability, resilience, and flexibility in the face of stress, conflict, or change.
The debate still rages between philosophers, neuroscientists, and even physicists regarding free will, determinism, and consciousness. I feel I have the power of choice, which many call ‘free will.’ Credible research indicates this is an illusion. My philosophy aligns with current psychology studies that show benefits to having a sense of agency (aka, a sense, or illusion of control and free will). Therefore, I will believe in the illusion due to its usefulness (thank you to Derek Sivers’ book Useful Not True).
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
William James, diary entry April 30, 1870
We also need to recognize that we do not control most things. All you can control is your attitude, effort, behavior, and actions. Therefore, when constructing our weekly plan, it is imperative that we are flexible, and it’s helpful to construct contingencies.
Covey writes, “The best way to do this is to organize your life on a weekly basis. You can still adapt and prioritize, or ‘renegotiate commitments,’ daily, but the fundamental thrust is organizing the week.” Covey identifies four steps to weekly planning. First, you identify your key roles. I would add here your active projects list, too. Projects should be sorted already per the role they fulfill, for example, “family dinner party” falls under my family roles (husband, son, and brother-in-law).
Next, you select goals you feel will fulfill that role within the next seven days. Those goals may be larger—the projects for that role—or smaller ‘next actions.’ I suggest you focus on actions, not the whole project. You can’t do projects. You can only do identified actions that culminate in project completion.
Ideally these weekly goals would be tied to the longer-term goals you have identified in conjunction with your personal mission statement.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
Once the goals (next actions) have been selected, you schedule time in the coming week to achieve them.
After identifying your MIT [most important task], you need to turn it into a calendar item and book it as early in your day as possible.
Kevin Kruse, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management
We will return to this idea of time blocking shortly. Covey’s last step is “Daily Adapting.” This step is about adapting daily to reprioritization, unanticipated events, and opportunities in a thoughtful way. Remember my admonition about flexibility.
Taking a few minutes each morning to review your schedule can put you in touch with the value-based decisions you made as you organized the week, as well as unanticipated factors that may have come up.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
Let’s walk through each step with some examples.
Take a look at your roles. Draft out (if you haven’t already) at least one goal for each role. For example, in my role as a homemaker, which I separate into ‘cook’ and ‘clean,’ I have the goals: dinner on the table every night, and clean bathrooms every week.
Now, for those goals, what actions can you take this week to move towards those goals? Write those down—a simple list will do. Dinner every night is more like a big project with multiple steps or actions. Things like determining how many nights you need to cook, planning a weekly menu, picking recipes, making a shopping list, and going to the grocery store. All this before you can cook.
‘Clean the bathrooms once a week’ is more of an autopilot sort of thing. There’s one day every week I do that unless some other priority comes up. So now I check the calendar. Nothing to interfere with the normal schedule? Then block out a few hours on that day to clean the bathrooms.
As for all the actions for the project of dinner, the same procedure applies. Look at the calendar and block out the days and times you will do the actions. I usually do my weekly planning on Sundays, and that includes menu planning. Monday is my usual errands and shopping day. Monday morning, I review the recipes and look to see what I need versus what’s in the pantry. Then I make my lists and head out on my errands.
All this house husband stuff may seem mundane compared to ‘important’ work projects, but the process is the same. This is what I did at the start of my work week.
Let’s say I was investigating some malfeasance afoot in the district. Certain actions need to take place—identify the perpetrators, interview the witnesses, collect evidence, communicate with the Investigative Services Branch and prosecutors, follow up on leads … and the list goes on. I would take a look at my calendar and block out days and times to get those actions done. Barring any emergencies or new priorities, I executed the actions on the scheduled day.
Now, say I’m out on the road headed to the office to make some of those phone calls, and the vehicle I’m following displays some wonky driving behavior. Am I going to ignore the possible ‘deuce’ just so I can make those calls on time? Nope. Following up on your reasonable suspicion takes priority. This is what I mean about your level of control.
No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent implementation of an original thought that has been considered in advance in every detail and retained to the end.
Helmuth von Moltke “the Elder,” 1871, essay on military strategy
There are two more things to talk about regarding planning: ‘time blocking’ and ‘sharpening the saw.’ Time blocking is dedicating certain minutes or hours to a given task. Sharpening the saw is a more nuanced version of what is now called “self-care.”
In theory, time blocking is easy and makes perfect sense. In theory. In practice, though, it makes the most sense for two groups: creatives and automated or near-automated task workers.
Creatives
Writers, artists, musicians, and creators of all sorts need blocks of time to create. This goes back to Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Whatever pattern is best for you, whenever is the most high-energy and creative time—you need to sit down and create. So you block out large chunks of time where you are otherwise undisturbed. For many, the best time is in the morning.
The most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, proactive work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.
Mark McGuiness, quoted in Manage Your Day-to-Day
Automated
If what you produce is rote or repetitive, and you know exactly how long it takes to produce one unit and how many units you need to produce, you can block out that time accordingly.
If you do not neatly fit into one of these two groups, you can still take advantage of time blocking in several ways. First, automate or near-automate anything you can. What does that look like? Make checklists and templates for common activities.
Take report writing, for example. As an LEO, I had checklists for investigations and reports. I also had approved, tried-and-true templates for the most common arrests and investigations. I also had templates for MVAs, DUIs, fire origin and cause investigations, and even templates for commonly issued citation probable cause statements. These all ‘nearly automated’ my work. I knew fairly well how long they would take to adapt to the fact pattern of the current case I was writing up.
As an aside —
A tactic I learned in the Navy—never tell someone ‘exactly’ how long the job will take. Estimate that for yourself, double the estimated time, and give the client or supervisor that time. If you say, “It will take me four hours,” they will start asking if you are done in two. This gives you some room to work in case something unexpected comes up. Also, when you come in under your time budget with an outstanding product, you look like a rockstar because you over-deliver.
A time-blocking example: Let’s say you have a hustle, or a degree you are working on, or a creative hobby that could become extra income. That creative work probably needs to be time-blocked on your calendar so that it doesn’t always get sidelined by ‘work’.
A variation to time-blocking is theme-batching your days. Monday is for budget work or household chores, writing on Tuesday, and errands on Wednesday. Date nights are always on Saturday. There’s a staff meeting on the second half of every Thursday, so on the first half of Thursday, I’m gathering my data and writing my report to management.
Sharpening the Saw
“Sharpen the Saw” activities are about renewal, maintenance, and sustainment of four adaptive fitness domains or “energy valences,” as Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz dub them:
- Physical—the ability to adapt and sustain healthy behaviors needed to enhance health and wellness,
- Mental—the ability to effectively cope with unique mental stressors and challenges needed to ensure mission readiness,
- Emotional—the ability to engage in healthy social networks that promote overall well-being and optimal performance,
- Spiritual—the ability to strengthen a set of beliefs, principles, or values that sustain an individual’s purpose and meaning.
I first read of this idea in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, wherein he writes, “Habit 7 … is preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have—you.”
This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in like—investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to reorganize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in four ways.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Without renewal, you will eventually break. Other authors have written of this as well.
Personal energy management is a silent thief of productivity.
Gary Keller & Jay Papasan, The One Thing
Secret #14 – Invest the first sixty minutes of each day in rituals that strengthen your mind, body, and spirit.
Kevin Kruse, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management
Because energy capacity diminishes with overuse and underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement
The strategic options that you have available to you are limited to the quality and quantity of resources [energy] you have at your disposal. …your ability to build, secure, and sustain your resources so that you can use them when you need to is critical…
Patrick VanHorne, Logistics & the Strangling of Strategy, CP Journal 10/14/2018
This is all about the time-energy paradigm. The quality of energy you apply to anything is more important than the quantity of time.
Secret #15 – Productivity is about energy and focus, not time.
Kevin Kruse, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management
What I’m getting at here is that it is important—critical, even—that you schedule renewal every day. Covey suggested a “Daily Private Victory” or a “minimum of one hour a day in renewal of the physical, spiritual, and mental dimensions.” I suggest—if you are still working and have less control over your day—to do this in the morning.
When I worked a ‘9-to-5’, I had the most control over my mornings. And to a lesser degree, my evenings, only in that I found that if I didn’t do it in the morning, it couldn’t happen while I’m at work, and I’d likely be too tired by the end of the shift. Furthermore, it was never certain that ‘the shift’ would only be eight hours—I never knew when I’d get off work, or if I would get a late-night call-out.
Now that I’m retired, I find pushing my exercise toward midday, after a bout of creativity, works well to refresh my mind for another creative spurt or a shift to physical activities, like chores around the house.
Cross-Pollinate Across Platforms
Last, but not least, it’s important that all your platforms match—your digital and analog calendars, especially. You don’t want to double-book commitments because your iPhone or Google calendar doesn’t reflect your analog calendar, which you left at home or in the office.
One way to do this is to have fewer (only one?) platforms. For me, that would mean paper—a paper calendar and a notepad small enough to tote around everywhere. For you, that might mean applications on a smartphone or tablet. In that case, look for apps that work across platforms and easily merge with other apps, like Apple’s Notes, Reminders, and Calendar applications, or Microsoft’s Outlook and OneNote.
Most businesses and government agencies require you to use some contracted collaboration applications like Teams, Slack, and Google Workspace. I only have limited experience with Teams and no experience with the others, so you will need to look elsewhere for how-tos.
You will have to wait for Part IX of this series to learn how and why I use Apple’s native applications. In Part IIX, I’ll define projects and detail my project management system. Since “training missions” are projects by definition, I’ll write about them and how I set up and use my “Personal Laboratory Notebook.”
