In a comment on one of my recent posts, John noted the following:
I’ve been on and off with GTD and Covey many many times through out the years. I could never turn it into a habit and kept searching for solutions. About a month ago I had a business trip overseas and when I returned I had horrible jet lag.
I took advantage of it to realign my wake up time 2 hours earlier than usual and use the time to do daily and weekly review, and, simply, think and reflect. So far so good. I feel I’m on the top of my responsibilities. That feels really good. And I’m not using exactly GTD nor Covey. I just improvise along.
So it seems it doesn’t matter how one approaches time mgmt. The essence is periodic reviews and, as David Allen said, think.
John really hit on a couple of good points: the weekly review being one, and the importance of really thinking being the other.
In this insanely busy world, which is only going to get busier (based on trends of the past several years), we often fail to take time to just set and think. When we do give ourselves a few minutes, it’s typically to take a breather. Those are necessary, of course. In fact, when we can we should just go outside and walk a bit to “clear the fog.”
But, it’s also important that we make time to really think, to anticipate what might happen in the future and to plan so we can be ready for it, to question whether we are really spending our time in appropriate ways, to picture ourselves in our customer’s shoes so we can try to see what they think about our operations, and so on.
Ideally we should do this every day, but taking the time to do it only in connection with the weekly review is better than not taking the time to do it all. Bill Gates used to dedicate an entire week each year to getting away from it all and just thinking. (Until I read the linked article, I had thought that he did this for two weeks each year, based on an article I read in Forbes or The Economist, or some other mag, several years ago.) Few people can take the time to mimic Bill’s annual Think Weeks, but it does drive home how important it can be to dedicate time to thinking.