The most important practice that I recommend everyone adopt for their personal productivity is a Weekly Review – a regular reflection on their priorities and goals designed to give them a sense of clarity for the upcoming week.

Whether you adopt the Getting Things Done method or something else isn’t important. It doesn’t matter whether you do it every single week at the same time, or only occasionally as needed. It can be more philosophical and introspective, or detailed and specific. It’s up to you.

But this brings up the question of design. How do you choose what kind of review you should perform? How do you perform it? What are the steps? How do you know when you’re done?

These are all process design questions, and very few people are prepared to take them on. But without this practice, you’re never going to level up your productivity. In the same way you can’t level up your finances without regularly reviewing your budget.

The first step in designing a process is to decide what it’s for: what results or outcomes do you want the process to produce? Here are the intended outcomes I’ve decided on for my three reviews:

• My Weekly Review is designed to give me just enough situational awareness to take effective action
• My Monthly Review is designed to translate my long-term goals into current projects
• My Annual Review is designed to redirect my time, effort, and attention toward a future of my own creation

In previous articles, I explained how I do my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews as examples. In this article, I’ll examine the fundamental design of each one and show how they are integrated across time to produce the results I want.

The Principle of Actionability

The most fundamental principle in a productivity review is actionability. As in, how relevant a piece of information is for taking action.

The email in your inbox from your boss with the subject line “Urgent!” is highly actionable – you need to know what it says before taking any action. The catalogue at the bottom of your desk drawer is not actionable – you don’t need it to take action.

If you look at the review checklists I published previously, you’ll notice that they are essentially just lists of every place where I receive or store information, sorted from most actionable, to least actionable.

Here are the three checklists as originally published (click each title to view a checklist template you can copy for your own use):

Weekly Review

1. Clear email inbox
2. Check calendar (-2/+4 weeks)
3. Clear physical inbox/notebook
4. Clear computer desktop/downloads
5. Check Mint transactions
6. Process Evernote inbox
7. Prioritize and file new open loops
8. Review Waiting For list for followup
9. Choose Today tasks

Monthly Review

1. Review and update Life Goals
2. Review and update Project List
3. Review and update Areas of Responsibility
4. Review Personal Narrative Vision
5. Review Someday/Maybe items
6. Reprioritize tasks
7. Extract highlights from finished ebooks
8. Empty trash in task manager and Evernote

Annual Review

1. Write Gratitude List
2. Answer questions about last year
3. Answer questions about next year
4. Add new Life Goals and Projects
5. Read last year’s Personal Narrative Vision and write next year’s
6. Review last year’s Daily Routines and write next year’s

Here are the same items from the lists above, in the same order, but combined into a single list. I’ve distilled each item to just the thing being reviewed or updated, and removed non-essentials:

Master Review Checklist

1. Email inbox
2. Calendar
3. Physical inbox tray/notebook
4. Computer desktop/downloads folder
5. Evernote inbox
6. Task manager inbox
7. Waiting For list
8. Today tasks
9. Life Goals list
10. Project List
11. Areas of Responsibility list
12. Personal Narrative Vision
13. Someday/Maybe items
14. Next Actions list
15. Gratitude List
16. Perspective questions
17. Life Goals list
18. Personal Narrative Vision
19. Daily Routines

Generally, the higher on each list you go, the more often that item changes, and the more actionable it is. Items lower on each list change less frequently, and are less directly actionable.

This ordering is a conscious design decision. I only want to review each item as often as needed to give me peace of mind. If I find that I’m resisting an item because reviewing it feels unnecessary, I’ll move it further down the list so that I spend less attention on it in the future.

For example, it wouldn’t make sense to review my Project List every day, when it only changes every few weeks. Forcing myself to do so just so I can check a box would quickly make my Weekly Review feel like a useless chore. Which it would be. Instead, I constantly tweak and adjust my checklists, so that I’m only looking at each item with the appropriate frequency.

I believe that a major cause of people “falling off the wagon” with their Weekly Reviews is that they don’t undertake this fine-tuning process. If you think you can just copy and paste someone else’s review checklist (including mine), you’re going to be disappointed. It is only through experience that it can be personalized. And it is only through personalization that it becomes sustainable, and even enjoyable.

Let’s take a closer look at the design of each checklist.

Weekly Review

Weekly Review

1. Email inbox
2. Calendar
3. Physical inbox tray/notebook
4. Computer desktop/downloads folder
5. Evernote inbox
6. Task manager inbox
7. Waiting For list
8. Today tasks

INBOXES

The first four items on my weekly checklist (Email inbox, Calendar, Physical inbox tray/notebook, Computer desktop/downloads folder) change throughout the day and often contain the most actionable new information. It would be foolish to take an action without getting up to speed on the latest updates, so these items appear near the top.

Here’s another way to think of it: the first four items in the Weekly Review are public facing. They are each receiving areas (or inboxes) designed to receive a specific type of actionable information from the outside world: