Review?
 

I just can't seem to get my head around "Review." In the Inspector window for Projects there is a pane that says, "Review." How do I go about using this? I have also noticed that there is a menu command, "Mark Reviewed." How should that be used?

My problem with Review is that I'm not clear on how it should be used in a "trusted" system. Would someone please explain how to use this feature? I've searched the forums and haven't found anything that explains how Review works. TIA!

The idea behind the review functionality is to allow you to do a regular check-in on the progress of your projects. If you're an adherent of Getting Things Done, you'll recognize this as the "weekly review" done at a per-project schedule.

The way I use it is to create a perspective that is only the right-hand pane (the left pane is completely closed; you can do this by double-clicking the thumb resizer between the two panes), and using the filter/view bar set to Next Review/Name/Available/Any/All.

Then I read through every available action/project that has a review date "within the next week" or earlier, and ensure that there are no open loops, possibly marking off stuff I've done but forgot to check off, dropping projects, etc. When I've reviewed an item, I mark it as "reviewed", and it goes away, showing up at a future (designated) time.

The biggest weaknesses with this are that it's very time intensive, and there's no way to show a subset of projects (e.g. active/pending/on-hold); either you review all, or you do multiple reviews.

I've found it easiest to set the reveiew to a standard amount of days ..and if the project is especially hot .. set that to a more frequent basis .

I make " reveiws " part of my morning routine .. ymmv

Cool suggestion Jason! I hadn't thought about creating a perspective for it.

I use review the same way.

The key is using the grouping filter in the view bar.

It saves some time for me, especially with being able to set some items to review more than once a week.

Better keyboard manipulation would make this speedy.

Thanks!
 

I think I'm getting it. I'm moving over from Life Balance and I'm about ⅓ through reading Allen's GTD so I do have some catching up to do. Thanks for the help.

Thanks to richardripley for asking this and jasong for the detailed reply. I was wondering the same thing.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but here's what's happening to mine. After I created the perspective, go into it and start the review process, the first thing that pops up is the "Miscellaneous" container that I use for single action projects. That's fine, since everything in Miscellaneous is a week behind the review timeline. But when I go to change a single action, it changes them all and resorts my full list accordingly.

Is this a Miscellaneous folder/project/container behaviour? Or does this happen with all projects?

The review acts on a project, not on an action, therefore the behavior you're seeing is a side-effect (some would say defect) of the way single-action containers (i.e. projects with the "this is a list of single actions" checkbox checked) are treated by OmniFocus.

Because the actions are technically part of a single project, when you change the reviewed date, you're not changing it for the action, you're changing it for the project. Thus, the entire single-action "project" is marked as reviewed.

If you think this behavior should be changed, please send feedback to OG through the Send Feedback mechanism in OF.

Aaah. That makes more sense. Thanks!

I've sent a feedback in :)

[QUOTE=jasong;25465]
The way I use it is to create a perspective that is only the right-hand pane (the left pane is completely closed; you can do this by double-clicking the thumb resizer between the two panes), and using the filter/view bar set to Next Review/Name/Available/Any/All.

Then I read through every available action/project that has a review date "within the next week" or earlier, and ensure that there are no open loops, possibly marking off stuff I've done but forgot to check off, dropping projects, etc. When I've reviewed an item, I mark it as "reviewed", and it goes away, showing up at a future (designated) time.
[/QUOTE]


Thank you for your explanation, this seems very helpful.

I recreated what you did in the "Planning mode", with the filter settings as described, but then I get two groups of "Today" and "Within the next month", not the week as you described. How do you get that?

Great post!

I had an action item to post on this topic this morning...

I had difficulty determining how the review process was handled in OmniFocus.

Each action has a review date tag, there is a "Mark Reviewed" button.

But nothing happens on its own.

After reading this post I created a Perspective with the suggested filter view settings.

This works, but a) had to be manually setup and b) again is not presented to you in any automated way - you have to remember to go to that weekly review or scheduled review on your own.

I would suggest for newbies that there be some hand-holding here, either with a specific "Review Mode" or with a canned perspective that will automatically appear when any actions are past their scheduled review interval.

(I did send this feedback to Omni already, along with the poor way that singleton actions work in regard to reviewing).