The Getting Things Done (GTD) Weekly Review Using Evernote

Hello everybody, I'm Ray Sidney-Smith and I am an Evernote Certified Consultant and always just happy to share new information with you all. You are here at the webinar for Getting Things Done, the weekly review using Evernote. And so what I want to do today is just a very simple agenda. What I want to do is I want to go over the weekly review and just kind of COVID the four corners of the weekly review so people know. If you don't know what the weekly review is, you can kind of get an idea of it. And then what we'll do is we'll get into setting up for the weekly review, and I will walk you through the basic components of how I structure the weekly review for those who use Evernote as their task manager and project manager. So I'll leave a little bit of time there at the end for Q&A, and I'll be happy to answer any questions and answers. Just know that I'll be holding the questions till the end. Gusto Pinault from Productivity Voice is so kind as to be helping me out in the chat here, and so he'll be following along in the chat and capturing your questions to be able to collect for me to answer at the end. So if you have any questions, feel free to go ahead and answer those questions. In the, uh, in the chat, and then he'll, he'll copy those over there for me to be able to see in the chat window in the webinar software. Okay, so with that, let's talk about the Weekly Review. Uh, first and foremost, David Allen has given us this great, uh, definition for the Weekly Review that he provided in the appendix of the newest edition of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. And so there on page 308, he has this definition that the Weekly Review is the best practice recommended of regrouping at an operational level once a week, bringing up the rear guard by cleaning, by getting clean, current, and creative to sustain week-to-week control and focus. And I really can't better say it than that. It is a very clear understanding of the fact that every 7 to 10 days, he has said over the years, is a good amount of time for life's messiness to get cleaned up and for us to to allow us to be able to then clean up and get, you know, sort of the stuff that is icky and the stuff that is going really well in life all collected together so that we're able to sit down and get that stuff organized in a way that allows us to approach the upcoming week well. And so just a couple of things. If you have not watched the prior webinar where I talked about the setup of using GTD inside of Evernote, you know, I'll try to kind of help you understand how the setup is inside of this Evernote demo account so that you're better aware of it. But just know that I've set up the Evernote account in such a way that it allows us to be able to do the weekly review in the simplest possible manner. It really allows us to do GTD in the simplest possible manner. And I wanna make sure that everybody is aware that there is some work that needs to be done to have your Evernote system set up in such a way. And that webinar replay you can watch later. So, um, let's first start with the underpinnings of the setup itself. And so, as I said before, I have set up the, uh, the system here in Evernote with a series of notebooks, and that gives me some control over what happens and where. So first and foremost, for this to really work, every action in your Evernote system that is a next action needs to be tagged as Actions, and every project in your system that is a project needs to be tagged Projects. And so you'll see that you have some projects here and they're tagged as Projects. It doesn't really matter what the other tags are and for that particular item, but they're all tagged Projects. Then if we go and look at any of the other items, say Somedays or Maybes— Somedays, I don't have any in here, or Maybes— they are all tagged separately as Somedays and Maybes because I do categorize somedays, and maybes separately. But either way, let's talk about setting up the first component of the weekly review checklist. So what I have here is a commonplace notebook that is really the place where you can put whatever you want in your Evernote system. And this is for notes at meetings, this is for journaling, if you'd like to keep a journal of your everyday life. And this is where I think the weekly review note is that I recommend to folks goes. So let's take a step back. Every week when you sit down to the weekly review, I really like this notion of being able to have a single solitary note, um, that allows me to be able to track what it is that I'm doing with the weekly review. And really, all told, I really believe in customizing the weekly review checklist so that What I have on my checklist is not going to be the same thing that you have on your checklist. You should really customize it in every possible way so that it is the weekly review you need to do, not the weekly review that I need to do. And so just keep that in mind. And so what I've done here is I have created a template, um, for me to do my weekly reviews. And what you're seeing here is the prior week's weekly review in this demo account. So let me walk you through this. In essence, what you do is you create a new note, and in that new note, you would call this the Weekly Review and say there's a date associated with it, right? But we don't know what that date is, so we're going to leave that as just an all-caps DATE. We can then paste into here, um, the components of the Weekly Review. And here we have the 11-point checklist, right? That's 3, 6, 9, 11. Yep, there are 11 checklist items here on the weekly review. And again, we want to tailor these. So when we want to get our inbox to zero, what we really want to do here is to note, for example, what are your inboxes, right? So it's like email account A, you know, then there's email account B. You get to determine which inboxes you, you believe are real inboxes. So for example, I don't believe my Twitter DMs are a real inbox. So that's just not a— that's not an inbox I'm gonna process. Same thing with Facebook messages. Those are not— those are ephemeral conversational tools. They are not places where I tell people, oh, you know what, you should go ahead and send me a message with a task embedded or some kind of commitment embedded within Facebook. I'm just not monitoring those, and if people send them to me there, then that's their folly, not mine. So I go ahead and You know, let, let people know in my life where they should send me things. Typically that's via email, and, and that's where I'm gonna capture it. If they do send me something there in, say, a Facebook message or a WhatsApp message or whatnot, then I'm going to capture that into my system in some other way, shape, or form. So I'm gonna screen capture that item, throw that into my Evernote inbox, and so therefore those places are not places I need to inbox zero. I— they're just, they're just communication threads. Okay, so what you want to do is you want to be able to go in and identify which are your, which are your places to, to zero out in terms of things. And once you get your list kind of identified here, so say for example, you want to be able to, you know, have your waiting for list in a different place. It doesn't live inside of Evernote. Well, note that here. So that everywhere you're looking for things, right? Collecting loose papers and materials. I would create a list of where loose papers and materials, kitchen counter, for example. If things tend to pile up on your kitchen counter, that's something that you should probably take to heart and say, okay, I better add that to my weekly review checklist as a way for me to, again, it's that cleaning up the rear guard, right? You wanna make sure that you know where it is that things tend to pile. And so for example, on my desk, you know, in tray. And it's definitely a place that I collect loose papers and materials. And then of course, then there are other places that that might happen, you know. Is it your glove compartment box? Is it your trunk in your car? Is it a particular area of the house where things just tend to go? You get the mail, you put it on the, the side table in the living room when you walk in the front door. Wherever that might be, you make a list of those things and customize this so now it's tailored to you. Okay, and that's really important here because ultimately what happens is that if you don't have this tailored to you, you don't have clear understandings of what should happen, and then it's just collect loose papers. Well, okay, well, where do I go get those loose papers? You need some level of instruction here to get yourself in order. Okay, so once we've done that, we can then go over here, and in the top right-hand corner of your Evernote— I'm in the Evernote for Windows right now— but in the top right-hand corner, you should have a the more options button, which is the three dots icon, and an option to save as template. And so I'm not gonna go over that right now, but you have a save as template option, and you can go ahead and save this as a template. Now, that's what I've already done here. And so what will happen then is when I'm ready to start my weekly review, I'm gonna click on new note in my commonplace notebook. I'm gonna go ahead and click on template here. So see here inside of the text of the body of the, of the note, I have a template option. And if I click on my templates, you can see here that there is a weekly review checklist. Now this should be the customized weekly review checklist that you created. I'm going to click on that and then it pre-populates this weekly review note with the, with the checklist that you have now modified and created. So in this particular case, I'm going to go to the end here. And I'm gonna say Weekly Review, and I'm gonna put today's, uh, uh, say Friday's date, October— I'm sorry, November 1st, I think it is, right? Um, it doesn't really matter. Um, and so then what will, what will happen now is now I have this Weekly Review, uh, note, and I can now mark it up, put new things in here. If, if this particular week requires me to review something more thoroughly, I'm going to add that into this note. And you decide when you create this Weekly Review note. So for me, I would create this at the end of my prior weekly review so that it gives me a chance to be able to put notes in here like, oh, you know what, when I'm reviewing my someday maybes, I really need to make sure that I put some attention and time on this particular thing. Okay. Now you can go a level above this. And so this is really more advanced level stuff here, but you can go a level above this and you can actually create a series of weekly review templates, ones that are just your weekly, which would be 3 times per month. And then you can create a monthly weekly review checklist, and those would contain items that you would check only on a monthly basis. So every 4 weekly reviews, you would then check those items. And then you can create another one that would be a quarterly weekly review. So you would do weekly review, weekly review, weekly review, monthly review, right? You would repeat that 3 times, and then on the— on the— what is that? 12th weekly review, you would then have a quarterly review, and you could put special things on the quarterly weekly review. And that could be spring, winter, summer, fall items. And those can be things like, oh, you know what, I need to make sure that I add to my projects list clean out the gutters, um, in the fall so that once the rainy season comes, I'm able to You know, keep the house gutters clear and clean and all those other fun things. In the spring, you could have a spring cleaning set of checklist projects that you can add here, and then that way you can add them as projects later on down the road as well. So you can really use the checklisting function here and the templates within the weekly review to be really clean with regard to the edges of your weekly review and what needs to be reviewed on any given week, month, or quarter. And I like that. Okay, so, uh, in essence, what we then do is we can look next to how I've structured the weekly review checklist here. As you can see here, on under the checklist, we have a clear set of 11 items. And what I've done is I've gone ahead and added some additional material here to each of these. These are actually searches that you can either create as saved searches, but they really aren't necessary. Um, in my, in my case, I like being able to just have everything tagged actions, everything tagged waiting fors, everything tagged projects. And, uh, and so I can just literally copy these into the search field and they will pull up all the things that are actions in the system. Now you may need to do a little bit more than that, and I'll explain in a moment, but just so you know, here we can actually type out complex saved searches and then just copy them into the search window when we need to. We can also create these as saved searches, and I'll show you that in a minute as well. But anyway, so First things first, we collect our loose materials. And like I said before, um, in this particular one, yeah, um, you see that I noted the specific areas. So I would go to the kitchen counter, I would collect up all of my loose trays, uh, loose ends. I would go to my desk and tray, I'd, you know, pick up all those things. I'd bring them all here into a, you know, my desk, sit them on my desk, and they would all be there. Then ultimately, I want to be able to zero out all of my inboxes. Now what this really means is collect loose papers and materials. It really means to clarify those items. So you really should then go in and decide what is it, is it actionable, will it take more than one action, and then start to go through the workflow process for being able to get those things to into your system in some way, shape, or form. So you're going to be capturing these items into your inbox and then, and then from there clarifying those as well. We were then gonna inbox zero, right, all of the inbox items and get all of those items into zero status. Well, then we're then gonna do a minesweep. And there are lots of ways in which you can do a minesweep. But in essence, what we really wanna do here is we wanna go to our inbox and start capturing everything that might be on our mind into Evernote. So I might sit here and I'm gonna capture some items and I'm gonna say, oh, you know what? I really told my son or daughter that I wanted to build a birdhouse with him or her. So I capture that into my inbox. Then I'm like, oh, you know what, my car is on its last wheel. It's gonna— it's just, it's done, and we need to buy a new car. And so I capture that open loop, that, you know, that item on my mind into the inbox. And so once we get to that point, then we decide on what these things are. And so So say I say, all right, well, this is a, a project. I've, I've tagged it as a project, and the build a bird box, uh, the birdhouse with, um, you know, Jane— say that's my daughter's name— and, uh, so build house, birdhouse with Jane becomes a project, and that goes ahead and gets thrown into the projects list. Now, of course, I'm about to do the weekly review, so I will review the project once I get to it and identify an action. So I don't need to do that here. All I need to do is anchor and solidify whether or not there's a project here that needs to be done, right? Because I don't know whether I'm gonna do an action for that thing this week or not. And we— and the GTD methodology is about working from week to week. So we want to be able to not create things that we don't need. However, say that we were in a state of like, oh, I do know what the exact next thing is, which is, you know, research online the, uh, you know, the— what do you call it— uh, not plans, you know, birdhouse plans that might be available, um, for building a large birdhouse. I don't know, just making stuff up. But say that I knew what the action was, I could place that here. If I had any other materials associated with that, I could throw that in here also. Say that if I had the, uh, the the, you know, the architectural plans for a birdhouse, I could go ahead and throw that PDF in here or image that I screenshotted from a various, you know, some from various sources into the document as well. So we could put that in there. All right, back up to the inbox, and I'm gonna go through and again, I'm gonna clarify the inbox. And so I'm gonna say, okay, buying a new car, I wanna buy a new car before the end of the month. I like to have some time-boundness associated with this. And then I might put in here criteria for the car. So it needs to be 4-door, uh, it needs to be, um, an SUV, uh, it needs to have X amount of fuel economy, right? So we can do all kinds of things in here to just give us some, uh, some guardrails for what we're starting to look for in terms of the project, because it's on my mind already. I want to just get that stuff off my mind. But ultimately, then again, we've tagged it projects. And we've moved it over here to the Projects notebook, okay? So we've gotten ourselves to Inbox Zero, and this is the stage of the Weekly Review where now, where were we? We were in, I was playing around in one of these, but it doesn't matter anyway. So we'll just use this one as the, as the one we're working off of, doesn't matter. And so note again, I've created checklist items so we can start to check these items off as we complete them. I'll uncheck these just so we can play. And also note here that I can start to annotate the bottom of this weekly review note. And here I can put in my thoughts. If I wanted to kind of get some emotional stuff off my chest, maybe this is where I go ahead and write that stuff. And, or just again, to remind myself in the coming week what I might need to look for when I sit down for my weekly review, I want to review my prior week's weekly review note so that I'm able to see what it is from last week that I wanted to share with myself this week. But I didn't need to know any of that between then and now. And so next, we're going to review our actions lists. And in essence, all of our actions lists are context-based where we're using tags in order to do that in this particular GTD setup. So as you can see here, all of the actions, right, in my tags are, are listed down here. So all of the context-based actions lists are determined by a tag. So in order to review those actions, it really doesn't take very much other than to look at what I've completed and what I have not completed for purposes of figuring out what's going to happen in the next 7 to 10 days. So if I look at my actions list, you can see here that I have 4 actions, and, uh, you know, they could be any number of different things. Um, but once I've completed that action in the setup that I've designed, you just drag it over to Done, and it's done. And then I anchor the next action that needs to be done into the Actions notebook by tagging it as Actions. Now, in the way in which we can do this weekly review, this system is fairly simple. So in essence, I can just open up and type in tag :actions, and now it's going to pull up all the actions in my system. Now, if your system's more complex, as I said before, that would require maybe a little bit more structure in which we can then create a saved search and look for things that are across the system for various purposes, what those particular actions are by tag and notebook. So I may want to say everything that is in my actions notebook, and here I've created a shortcut to my actions notebook. I may say that I, I want to look at all of my all of my writing that needs to be done, all of my messages, all of those kinds of things. So we have some ability to be a little bit more discerning with the lists that we look at. But in essence, if it's in your Actions notebook, it is something that you plan to do this week, and therefore it should be looked at in all told, you know, the system. Now, everything for me then lives in Someday/Maybe until it becomes something that is going to be worked on this week. Now that's my own flavor of how I manage my GTD system. So that could be something that you decide is actions and a notebook called Actions Later. And so therefore you have another notebook in here where you create a notebook and this is, you know, Actions Later. And now everything that you're working on this week shows up here. Everything that is beyond this week shows up in this notebook. And now you have a bifurcation of your, your actions lists so that you see the things that are this week and this, the everything else, right? So you have kind of a, differentiation between those two pieces. It just depends on how you want to manifest your system, but it doesn't have to really be more complicated than that. And what I tend to see is that when folks try to make it more complicated than that, the system breaks down because you have to think about where things are in too many places. And then the weekly review especially becomes far more complex because you're not sure where things should be reviewed. Uh, so from my perspective, I really like the most simple way to do things, which is that if I'm not doing it now but I'm going to do it at some point, it's a someday. And that means that it belongs in the someday maybe notebook or a someday notebook. And again, actions later, someday, doesn't really make any difference. It's basically not being done this week. That's the differentiation, right? So, uh, since I have tags, uh, for all of these that show it as actions, I can search across my entire system and see all of those. And that's why I use that tag :actions item, right? So I can go ahead and do that. Now again, when we look at this from a GTD perspective, it really doesn't matter how we review these, much more so than the fact that we actually do review these. Uh, so I have here, uh, tag:actions. Maybe as I said before, you want to be able to say, uh, notebook actions, only items that are in your actions notebook. And of course we can then Search things for tag actions because those are things that are actions. And you can see here that I have 2 items in my Actions notebook that are tagged actions. Now this is for a situation where you have a more complex system and you just want to be able to look across the system and see all things that are in a specific notebook that are also tagged actions. So again, that would be like Actions Later or something else like that. You can do whatever you want at that point. If you go to File and then New Saved Search, you will see that your, your properties here are that you can name the search, and in this particular case, you know, Actions for Review, and you can then say notebook:actions and tag:actions are what you want to actually look for. Now, you can actually also use two other advanced search operators in this space if you have reminder notes or if you have created actions in a specific timeframe. I just wanted to show you this so you have a little bit of an understanding about the way in which the system works. So Evernote has advanced search grammar. You can see here we have two different search operators that are very, very powerful in the system. We have the created date/time advanced operator, and then we have the updated advanced operator. And what we can do is we can actually say when something has been created in the system. So say you captured a new note into the system in your inbox, and then you created a project or an action from it. We can actually review it based on the date that you created it, and we can also look for things based on the date in which it was most recently updated. So as this, this says, this will match any note that has been updated— that is, the timestamp has been updated— that is equal to or more recent time than the provided DateTime, that is the current date on your system. So we can actually use this, these advanced search operators to create once. We don't have to do this over and over again, but we just have to create that saved search once and now have it available to us. So say, for example, you only want to look at the items in your weekly review that have been created in the last 10 days, that is 10 days until today. Okay, so what I can do here is I can actually go in here and say I want created and I want it to be today minus 10 days. And so click OK, and now that saved search will be available to me, um, when I'm looking for something. Um, and so, uh, if— when I can clear out of this, let's go to that. And you can see here that we have the options for being able to then look for saved searches. And I forget what I called that. Um, I think I put actions For review, yes. So you can see here when we open up our saved searches, there is Actions for Review. If you're on the, on the Mac, you'll find that in the dropdown window when you click inside of the search field. So in the top right-hand corner of Evernote for Mac, you'll click in that field, you'll see the dropdown, and there'll be an Actions for Review. And so here, Actions for Review, I click on that and note that there are no items that have been created since— look how it shows me the exact dates— Saturday, October 19th, 2019. That is 10 days from today, 10 days before today, and it shows anything that's been tagged Actions for that timeframe. And so we're in the Actions notebook, it tells us that there's nothing to review, we're good, good as golden. So you see how if you start to think about where and how do I want to search my system, and what things do I need to look for as I'm looking in my system, you are really capable of starting to hone in on the things that you want to see. I just wanted to peek your interest there so that you can look at how an advanced search with a saved search can really create a powerful way to review your system when you want it to be. I'm happy to answer questions as it relates to that, but just so you have an idea that you can, uh, do that. Okay, so, um, next up we go back to our commonplace notebook, back to our checklist, and you can see that we've reviewed— and let's just pretend that we've reviewed our actions list— and then Next up is the idea of calendar data. So what I like to do is I like to actually turn off everything when I am reviewing, and because of that, I'm actually creating a little bit more work for myself, but ultimately I find that I'm more effective in getting my weekly review done. One way that I do that is actually by screenshotting my calendar, and I also like it because it's a backup just in case something should ever happen to my calendar. I like having that backup of a screenshot. So what I do is I go on over to my calendar, and let's pretend this is my calendar filled with items. And usually my calendar's a little bit more full, so I can't actually do it on this monthly view, but I usually have it on a biweekly view or a weekly view that allows me to be able to see everything in my calendar. And really what I do then is I just screenshot the calendar. So what I do is I, however you screenshot, I'm not gonna go over how to screenshot things, but you could just basically screenshot this take this over to Evernote, and here I can then just paste the calendar item. And as you can see, me and my crazy-looking face there, we go ahead and we have the calendar for view. It looks like I'm, I'm gaping at something shocking that just happened. But anyway, I like to copy into the Evernote note because it allows me to do so. I could just screenshot that particular calendar item. And so this is my, in essence, my past month worth of information. And every week I'm capturing that past month's worth of data so that I can review what happened. Is there something that needs to be tracked or maintained going forward? And then I can make note of that in my system. So I can go over to my inbox and say, oh, you know what, 2 weeks ago I met with so-and-so and I really need to follow up with them. And so then I can hop over to my note and I can say, you know, follow up with so-and-so, right? And then from there, I can of course tag it actions and know to place it into my system appropriately as I need to, okay? So as I'm reviewing my Evernote checklist, I'm able to go ahead and manifest that from seeing the calendar data. And again, I can do the same thing now With my upcoming calendar, I can hop over to the calendar and click on the, the upcoming month. Maybe you need to see the next 2 months. And again, we're just going to screenshot that item and then paste it into the Evernote note. And now, uh, when I do all of that, um, I am now, um, I can be completely offline, right, in Evernote, you know, at a cafe with no internet and still be able to get my weekly review done because I'm not dependent upon internet to access my Google Calendar or anything like that. It's all in here in the system. So I like to capture that stuff as I'm setting up for my weekly review. I will capture my calendar's data into here so that I'm able to just click on it, see the calendar at a glance, see what needs to be done, and then capture actions and so on and so forth from there. Wow, it keeps capturing my image in very awkward looking ways. Okay, next up is our waiting fors and projects. In the same way that I talked— walked you through the actions, you now need to start thinking about how are you going to manifest the various searches for your weekly review for looking at these things. So for example, your waiting fors and your projects, as well as your some days and your maybes. And again, like I said, some days are different for me than maybes. And so again, what I like to do here is to either have the, the searches already identified here. I don't need to create a saved search in my system and kind of clutter it up if I have the saved search already written out completely here. So if I was looking for something in my system that was a waiting for, to go through and say, okay, what are the things that I'm waiting for from others? All I need to do is just copy this tag and then paste it into my search window, and it's going to show me all of my waiting fors. Okay, and so now I can review all of my waiting fors. I don't need a list of any kind. It's all dynamic. It's going to search the entire system for it. So, um, so for example, uh, let's just, uh, create a note, and we're going to say, um, you know, waiting for report from Susan about the Latest web traffic, right? And I'm gonna go ahead and tag this Waiting Fours. And voilà, that's in there. Now when I go ahead and do that search of the system for Waiting Fours, you can see that it's gonna pull up the Waiting For that is tagged Waiting Fours, and it'll have all of those items listed that are Waiting Fours in your system. Okay, and so it's It's actually really simple and it's effective because you don't have to have any more structure than is necessary for you to be able to get through those things. All right, same thing with projects. You're going to go ahead and review your list of projects. And because in this particular flavor of, uh, of setup that I've created, your projects list is basically everything that sits inside of your projects notebook minus the structured notes that I've created here. So we have a couple of other things that I've created. We have a horizons list, and, well, the workflow diagram and map, the checklist, and a weekly review tracker. And this is just a very simple way to track whether or not you've done your weekly review. And so you can say, yes, I did my weekly review, and you can say, okay, I'm gonna check that off. And each week that you do your weekly review, you can go ahead and check off your weekly review, um, to see when you've done it. Okay, and, um, and so this is just like a, an easy little tracker to keep track of it. A little bit of game design. Nothing bad about keeping track of your weekly reviews to keep you motivated to keep doing them. So anyway, other than these notes that are in essence your higher horizon lists as well as some reference, the rest of the items that are in here are all projects. Now again, that doesn't matter because note that these items here are not tagged projects. Right, they're not tagged projects because they're not projects. So again, our projects tag, tag:projects, allows us to be able to search our entire system for projects. Now you might have some things that are projects inside of your someday/maybe, and you don't want to see those because you only want to see your active projects. This is where being able to limit by your notebook, right? So notebook:projects and then tag:projects and that gives us a list of only those things that are items that are in our projects notebook that are tagged projects. And these are really our projects for review. So again, we can go in here and we can say new saved search, projects for review. And this again, notice the nomenclature, actions for review, projects for review. Now we know those are associated with our weekly review so that when we're ready to go ahead and do that kind of saved search, we can then just look for projects for review, or we can even just look for review in our list. And we can see here we have our saved searches that are for the review. Okay, so we can click on projects for review, we can see those. Same thing again applies about being able to use the created, you know, datetime and the updated datetime limiters for us to be able to say, okay, I only want to look at projects that are things that I created or updated, things that I worked on in the last month or the last, uh, 2 weeks or the last year. And that way you can limit your search for your weekly review in that capacity. Okay. All right, back to here. Uh, we can review any relevant checklists if that you have. So you have a spring cleaning checklist, those kinds of things. You can review your some days and maybes in exactly the same approach that I talked about with regard to projects. And then voilà, your weekly review is done and, uh, you've got it dated. You can, again, as I said before, you can put notes in here to yourself, notes to your future self, to, to, um, to get yourself, um, you know, motivated next week. I'm not quite sure what it just did, but, um, there we go. And so we can put notes here to our future self, uh, selves, and, um, and then we have an ongoing, uh, kind of history of our weekly reviews. And again, when you're done with it, you can, uh, say that you're you're ready to get rid of this one, you can put it into Done. Again, when you, you, when you put things into Done, you also then want to also review that in your Weekly Review. And so for me, I like to actually look at my completed actions to make sure that those things that I put into, into Done that I completed, if there isn't another action associated with moving that project forward, I hopefully caught that in my projects review, but maybe it was a single action item. And so therefore, I want to go through my done and make sure that that single action item, maybe it did spur a project, maybe it did spur another action that needed to be completed to follow up or to check on something. So I actually like to go from there to, you know, go through, through the actions list, and then go to my done and make sure that anything that isn't, isn't there does get captured and brought into the system. And so I'm going to go ahead and delete these because 'cause those aren't necessary. So just be as like, keep mindful of that. If you are using this, you know, for tracking done items, you wanna go ahead and add that to your list. So what I would do is right here, I would say, you know, create a new list here, whoops. And we're gonna do this, and we do not want this to be a bulleted list. And whoops, I don't know why it's doing this formatting with me where it doesn't like my formatting. Okay, so here I can put review, review done items, right? And so again, this is all about customizing to your needs, but generally you want to be able to add these items so that you're able to know what needs to be done and where it needs to be done. But in my particular case, I wanna review my done items so that I can make sure that those are clarified. And then, you know, once they're done, they're done. You can keep them for some period of time, you know, say that you wanna keep them for X amount of time, but once they're reviewed, you go ahead and delete them because they are completed items and you don't need them anymore. Of course, you can always put them into an archive notebook if you really wanted to keep them around for longevity. And just making sure that you tag them with some kind of limiting tag, like the tag Z that I created, so that, see this tag Z, so that all of my saved searches, if it is tag Z, it doesn't show up in the saved search 'cause I've added it to it, those kinds of things. So you have some power there in being able to set up the system in that way. All right, let me review my notes and make sure that I covered everything that I wanted to cover with you. Um, so here we are. We have notes. We talked about that. We talked about that. Yeah, I think, I think that's it. I think I covered all of these items. All right, great. So, oh, I did want to, I did want to note that there are a couple of resources that you can, um, look at. Uh, actually, I have a podcast called Productivity Cast, actually with Augusta, who's helping out in the chat. They're with you. And, um, and so he and, uh, Francis Wade and Augusto Pinaud, uh, I'm sorry, uh, and Art Gelwix and I, um, record a podcast every, um, every week called Productivity Cast. And episode 45, uh, Augusto and I actually spent an entire episode talking about the weekly review. And so if you have really any questions about the weekly review as a, as a whole, uh, he and I talk about it from our experience over the years of both, you know, working with people, um, but also our own weekly review practices. And so I highly recommend that you listen to Productivity Cast episode 45. So if you go to productivitycast.net/045, you'll find that episode and you'll be able to learn, um, all about that. Um, and then, uh, and then where am I? Uh, and then a couple of other resources. One is the weekly review checklist itself. There's a PDF on the the website. And, you know, if you just type in GTD weekly review checklist PDF, literally it's the first search that shows up on the internet. And, and so there it is. It's a, it's a PDF, and it's a really easy, quick way for you to be able to just get the list. And then, like I said, as soon as you have this list though, you really do want to modify it to your own needs. So just be mindful of the fact that even if you do have the, the checklist in PDF, that is really not the end end-all be-all for it. A couple of other things: when you are processing your Weekly Review, a lot of people try to do project planning during your Weekly Review, but if you come across an item, say, in your Mind Sweep, and then of course Inbox Processing or Inbox Clarifying, or you get to a project that you're reviewing and it's a, it's a bigger project that requires more planning, I really recommend calendaring a project planning session that is using the Natural Planning Model to plan out that project. Don't try and do that during your weekly review. It's just gonna bog it down a little bit too much. Um, also, um, keep in mind that all of your senses, um, should be taken into account when you're doing your weekly review. So your, um, you know, your weekly review beverage of choice, your weekly review music, um, the environment. Are you going to be, um, locked away in your office? Are you going to be at a cafe where there's buzzing and bustling happening around you? Um, what will you be wearing? All of those things really do account for setting up the, setting the stage, so to speak, to perform your weekly review. And so you really want to be able to decide, okay, when I'm doing my weekly review, I always drink this drink, and I always have this snack, and I always have this music, and I always wear this outfit. Or maybe it's not an outfit, but maybe it's just a type of clothing. Maybe you want to be in more comfortable clothing than in, say, business attire. Or maybe you want to be in business attire so that you feel professional and sit down to really do your weekly review in that capacity. But remember that the way in which you present yourself to yourself when you sit down for the weekly review really does determine how successful the weekly review is going to be. So really pay attention to that. I also wanted to note that every week inside of Personal Productivity Club, which is the free digital personal productivity community that I run, we actually host something called the Weekly Review Accountability Party. And so it is a video meeting that happens on you know, once a week on Fridays, and everybody gets together and actually does their independent weekly reviews. So you're on camera for purely for accountability, and you do your weekly review, I do my weekly review, and we all just stay on for purposes of doing the weekly review in real time with each other. So if anybody feels like they would benefit from something like that, feel free to check that out. Okay, so, um, couple of other items and then we can get into Q&A. So, um, I know that I've gotten several more requests from folks, so I'm just letting everybody know that Productivity Summit 2019 is over. It's not happening, um, uh, you know, uh, upcoming. It happened on October 4th and 5th of 2019. And, um, if you are interested in getting access to the recordings, there were 49 total, I think, sessions. And, um, so if you go to that that gum.co/psmt2019, you will be taken to the page to be able to purchase the video sessions. Those include audio as well, and that code on the screen, RAN, the number 3, TEN, the number 7, DOG, will I believe take $50 off the purchase price. So take advantage of the code if you want to. Um, and so, uh, with that, I am going to have us, um, do Q&A. So Augusto, I think you've been pasting Q&A in here for me, and I am going to look at some of these things. All right, first and foremost, I've got a question from Michelle that's asking, um, can you save a template on, on the web as opposed to, um, the desktop versions? And so the answer, I believe, Is yes, if it, if it's been taken out in the new Evernote web version. Honestly, I don't think I have tried to do it lately, but if it's been taken out in the new Evernote web edition, it will be added back in, I presume, soon. If that's the case, then I don't know, actually. Now I'm testing it right now as I'm, as I'm talking, so I'll come back to that question. Second question: how can you adapt this system if you use an external to-do manager? Such as Todoist? And so you can't. So the, so the whole notion of doing this particular flavor of the weekly review is, is conditioned precedent on using Evernote as a task manager. I think there are probably parts of this that you can exhume from the system. I think the notion of creating the checklist— so I guess you can adapt this system if you use an external to-do manager. But so I would, um, I would be able to use the, um, the weekly review note that contained the template for being able to track and maintain those. Um, and, um, and, and then you'd be able to still capture your screenshots of your calendar and so on and so forth into the system and really use that as a master guiding document for it. But then otherwise everything else is done in the other system. And so you just need to know how, say for example, Todoist searches the system, you know, basically Todoist advanced search so that you're able to look inside of Todoist and say, okay, these are things that I want to look in and, and review as I'm making my way through my weekly review. I would imagine that the same searches apply, that if you manifested those searches in the, in Evernote for searching actions as well as past calendar data as well as your projects and someday maybes and waiting fors and so on and so forth, those will all really You know, translate over to your— any task manager that, um, you know, has those functionalities, um, which are just basically simple lists. Um, Ricardo is asking, um, can you repeat the name of the podcast? It is Productivity Cast, so productivity and then cast.net. And so let's go here and save as a template. Okay, yes, the functionality— going back to Michelle's earlier question— the functionality for saving as a template is available on the web. So you are able to take any note and create a template from it. Just click on the More Options icon in the top right-hand corner, and that will go, um, go into the, um, you know, into the Templates notebook. And so you have the Public Templates, and then you have the My Templates section, but it'll be under the My Templates section. Um, for Marcel, um, the answer is yes. So this webinar is being recorded, and, um, and so you, um, you'll be able to rewatch it just by revisiting the page you're watching on right now. So if you're able to see me right now, you'll be able to scrub back in time and go ahead and watch it there. Okay, so a couple of other items. If there are more questions, by all means ask them. I'm just going to keep going so that we can end on time. And so I've just got a couple of upcoming webinars and online masterclass that's coming up. So The November 26th webinar is going to be on using Evernote with the Microsoft Teams integration. So Microsoft Teams is Microsoft's version of Slack, so to speak. So, you know, Microsoft has, has Microsoft Teams, Google has Google Chat, and Slack is Slack. And so I'm going to be showing you in just a very quick webinar how to use and how to set up and use the Microsoft Teams integration with Evernote and how that how those pieces kind of work together. That'll happen on November 26th, right before I go on vacation. So I'm very excited about that. And, and then if you want to register for that, go ahead and check out the Evernote's event— I'm sorry, events.evernote.com page, and that's where you can register for that. And something new that I'm going to be trying, for those of you who may not know, I run both the GTD NYC and GTD DC meetups. And so both of those meetups meet monthly in New York and D.C., obviously. And we usually do a quarterly workshop where we teach, you know, Getting Things Done methods and so on and so forth. It's usually a really fun time. And what we tried to do was do it kind of, you know, 3 times a year, kind of a beginner, middle, you know, intermediate, and advanced, you know, set of workshops. What I'm doing is in January, I'm kind of bundling all that together and bringing that into an online environment, into a 12-week class that I think would be a lot of fun. And so we'll see how it goes. Again, it, it's one of those things where I'm just excited to be able to share what I've learned about getting things done over the years. And so we'll see. So it's gonna be starting in January 2020. If you want to get notifications about it, it's not live yet for registration, but if you're interested, just go to subscribepage.com/gswgt for Getting Started With Getting Things Done. And so subscribepage.com/gswgttd. And for those of you who do sign up, you'll get a special— you get special bonus pricing, so to speak, for the online masterclass. So there'll be a little bit of benefit there for you, for those who do sign up on that page specifically. So you have to sign up on that page in order to get the discount, and I'm really excited about that. I see a question about joining the meetups. So if you go to meetup.com, you can find the meetup page for either GTD DC or GTD NYC. And, and obviously it's a live in-person meetup, so you should live in either New York or DC in order to attend those. Um, okay. A question is coming in about notebooks. Stefan's asking about notebooks, folders, and tags. So notebooks are in essence what we would akin to translating to being folders. But if you could clarify that, Stefan, in terms of what you're— if you have an actual question, let me know. And then, um, Andre I apologize if I'm brutalizing your name. It says GTD runway, list of tags in the context of place, or one simple action. Um, I'm— it's a— so, so the question ultimately is, will you keep your next actions in projects or put it into a runway folder? Uh, so I would put that into an actions notebook, as I did in the setup that I showed you. But in essence, all your actions should be grouped together in an actions Notebook and then tagged its context. So in this case, you have call, visit, buy, bank, home. Those are contexts. And so those are easily then filtered into view by virtue of taking out everything else. So tag:calls will allow you to be able to see all of your calls. There's no reason to have, you know, 50 folders for different contexts when you may not have that many actions every week that need to be done, but if you happen to have a lot of calls this week, you may want to see those together so that you can work on them most efficiently. And so I, I always believe that you should have a master actions list with tags that allow you to filter out everything else but what you want to be able to do. Remember that contexts are, are basically limiting criteria. They are your ability to be able to filter out what you can't do right now and bring into view what you can. And since in a digital environment, that is very easily done with a single list and a series of tags or search, you know, saved searches. There's really no reason for us to have many different, uh, you know, notebooks, uh, with individual tasks hidden away in those silos. What ends up happening is we're actually not able to see our running list of actions in one place, and we get a little bit, um, you know, confused. Um, And so yeah, so that's that. I see a question from, uh, Ricardo that, um, can you give more information about the Getting Started with Getting Things Done online masterclass? Uh, so, uh, for, for all of you, it is for those who want to get started with GTD or those who want to get kind of a refresh on setting up their system. So, um, we're going to take it from the top. So it's going to be some, uh, base level information in those first few weeks as we make our way through more advanced data. So again, it's, it's up to you in terms of how you— how sophisticated you feel like you are with getting things done. But if you feel like you need to get restarted with getting things done, then that's obviously something that you want to consider. So I will put more material out there on, you know, on the registration page about really what we'll be covering, the syllabus, and so on and so forth at that time, so people can be aware of what we're doing and how we're doing it. And we're going to structure it in terms of a weekly lecture, so that'll be on an early part of the week, and then mid to late week, we'll then have office hours where you'll be able to work with myself or one of the other assistant instructors who will be able to help you with implementing those parts of the system that we talked about in that week's particular lecture. So it's kind of, you know, discussion about the topic, answering questions, and then you spending the week getting implementing, you know, getting set up and implementing that particular part of it. And over the course of those 12 weeks, with a couple of gaps so that you have maybe a week or two to work on those things, you'll then be able to finalize your system at the end of the 12 or 13 weeks of the program itself. Okay, hopefully that was helpful. All right, so that brings us nearly to the top of the hour together. We started about 6 minutes after the hour, so I want to make sure we finish in the 60 minutes that I allotted. And so I want to thank you all for joining me here for this webinar to see the, you know, using the weekly review system within Evernote. And if you have any questions, you have my email address on the screen. Feel free to shoot me an email and I'll be happy to answer any questions that you come across. I have a podcast called Getting More Done with Evernote, and so you can You can find that at gettingmoredonewithevernote.com. And actually just put out an episode this morning where Stacy Harmon and I did some commentary on the most recent behind-the-scenes video with Ian Small and May on how search is gonna work in the new Evernote versions that are coming out in beta very soon. And you can follow me on Twitter and on Instagram and all that other fun stuff. And so with that, I wanna thank you all for joining me for this webinar, and hopefully I'll see you at a future one. Take care, everybody.