How are we using the reviews?
 

I'm having trouble figuring out how to practically fit this into my workflow.
Do you use review in OF? if so how? How does it help?
Cheers,
Shanana

Shanana,

I've been using the review dates for a few weeks now and really like them. I set review intervals on all my projects with the most important projects scheduled for very frequent reviews and the on-hold ones and someday-maybes* scheduled less frequently.

During my daily review I look over every active project due for review today.

During my weekly review I look over every on-hold project due for review in the next week.

During my monthly review I look over every someday-maybe project past due for review.

I used to try to do thorough project reviews only during my weekly review. This meant that my weekly review took a long time and I didn't give appropriate attention to each project. Using the review intervals, I only have a small number of projects to review in each daily review and my weekly reviews are more efficient.

One tip, if you set review frequencies using prime numbers you can reduce the likelihood of multiple project reviews piling up on the same day. My active projects have review frequencies of 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, or 17 days. My on-hold and someday-maybe ones have review frequencies of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, ... weeks.

* I'm tracking someday-maybe projects using folders in OF named "Someday/Maybe" and marked inactive.

Interesting.

It is one of the features of OF that I have just not used at all as I was unlcear how it was to be used.

In GTD, a weekly review is supposed to cover all projects, on hold, etc, so putting projects in a 1 month review seems to fly in the face of.

That being siad, there are projects like "Buy a dog" that don't need to be reviewed weekly, because I am not going to buy a dog for a year or two.

I will start to play around and see if helps with the weekly review.

BZ

I'm waiting for Perspectives to be a bit more developed so getting started on a review can begin with a couple of keystrokes.

[QUOTE=BwanaZulia;19962]
In GTD, a weekly review is supposed to cover all projects, on hold, etc, so putting projects in a 1 month review seems to fly in the face of.[/QUOTE]

I don't do full project reviews in the monthly review. I do look at my someday-maybe projects to see if any should be made active.

Most of my on-hold projects don't need to be reviewed every week. If they needed that, I wouldn't put them on hold. That said, if I need to "clear the decks" for a particularly focused week, I can always put some active projects on hold without changing their review intervals. By virtue of their shorter review intervals, they'll come up again soon.

As far as doing some full project reviews on a daily basis, I was finding that weekly reviews were sometimes not frequent enough for my most important projects. I suspect that the recommended weekly review is just a sweet spot that Allen recommends as about right for most projects. OF's review intervals allow me to customize the review interval for individual projects without having to think about the interval much. I can easily tweak the interval down or up if I feel I'm reviewing it too little or too much. Ultimately I may go back to full project reviews once a week, but so far like my new system.

[QUOTE=Shanana;19946]I'm having trouble figuring out how to practically fit this into my workflow.
Do you use review in OF? if so how? How does it help?[/QUOTE]

In my reviews, I do a couple of things. So far I've followed the same practice for daily and weekly reviews. I don't have a model for monthly reviews yet, though Curt gave me some ideas above in the thread.

First, in project view, I group by review, with remaining actions visible, and get a sense of what my priorities ought to be, barring emergencies, for the next few days or couple of weeks (depending on the level of the review). I mark each project set for review "today" (or in the past) as reviewed once I've done that and noted in my journal anything I need to pay more attention to. I do this until there are no more projects listed for review today. Sometimes I'll adjust the review frequency or next review date if I find I'm reviewing a project too frequently or not frequently enough, or if circumstances require that I postpone work on a project to a specific date.

Second, I switch to context view and group by completion date. This is a quick and dirty way to review what I've accomplished; I note milestones in my journal. If tasks seem trivial enough I don't want a record of doing them, I'll delete them. OmniFocus's database structure is robust but I don't necessarily need much clutter!

Currently I keep a separate someday/maybe list in OmniOutliner, which I review from time to time but not on a fixed schedule. As I migrate those to OmniFocus I'll probably adopt some of Curt's strategies. But I'm hoping that OF will eventually make "on hold" projects active, automatically, once their start date arrives. That way I won't need to remember that particular part of the review.

(And, obviously, once perspectives can be managed and renamed, these review steps will become a lot easier to do.)

Lots of food for thought coming out of this. Curt, thanks for the detail on what you are doing with them. I think this type of flow will fit very well into my system and I too was struggling with a bunch of projects for which weekly wasn't enough of a review to keep them in effective play. At the same time, reviewing everything everyday isn't working perfectly because it is labour intensive and not that necessary. What was happening for me was a lot more "on the fly" review that would happen when I know I would be much better keeping as a "doing only, review free zone" so I'll give these review intervals a try and see if that helps.
Cheers,
Shanana

[QUOTE=brianogilvie;19991]once perspectives can be managed and renamed, these review steps will become a lot easier to do.[/QUOTE]

What I have done to name my perspectives is to download [url="http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/26268"]Pref Setter[/url] from versiontracker.com and use it to open "com.omnigroup.OmniFocus.plist" (in my home "Preferences" folder). One setting (called a "Key") is "Saved Perspectives." If you drill down, you will find a name for each perspective and can edit it.

You can also delete individual perspectives. That might help until Omni includes the renaming and managing features planned.

P.S. You can also set column widths while you're there, but you have to add keys for that using the names that Xmas gave in [url="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=18907&postcount=3"]an earlier post[/url]. That's how I found this work-around. I didn't want to use terminal to set the column width defaults.

dhm2006: Thanks for the tip! I have Developer Tools installed so I'll use Preference List Editor.

[QUOTE=brianogilvie;20016]I have Developer Tools installed so I'll use Preference List Editor.[/QUOTE]

Ha! I have Developer Tools installed also. I didn't think to look there for an editor. That would have saved me a lot of effort. Thanks. :D

Thanks for sharing your ideas, Curt, but I'm still unclear on how the review action you're describing is different from creating a repeating action for "Review project X." Is this two ways to accomplish the same thing, or are there subtle benefits I'm missing in the Review characteristics? I tried setting some review cycles, but I don't remember how it affects the start date or due date.

[QUOTE=chuckbo;20063]Thanks for sharing your ideas, Curt, but I'm still unclear on how the review action you're describing is different from creating a repeating action for "Review project X." Is this two ways to accomplish the same thing, or are there subtle benefits I'm missing in the Review characteristics? I tried setting some review cycles, but I don't remember how it affects the start date or due date.[/QUOTE]

Review dates have no effect on start and due dates. Using review dates is effectively the same as creating a repeating action for "Review project X", but doesn't require you to create a separate action for each project to be reviewed. Given that I have around 100 projects, that's a godsend.

I must say that there's more to this application then first meets the eye.

And, I must confess this is the first time I've figured out what the reviews are for.

Now for the question -- when you look at the action in the inspector, is the review date supposed to update to the next actual review date? Or, is it supposed to only show the next review date based on when you first create the action?

It looks to be the latter, but I'd love for it to be the former.

Thanks

Christopher

Christopher,

The review date updates when you use the Mark Reviewed command. It's available in the Edit menu, by short-cut, and in the tool-bar.

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;20066]Using review dates is effectively the same as creating a repeating action for "Review project X", ...[/QUOTE]

I haven't found this to be the case. That is, when a review date that I've set for a project comes around, nothing seems to happen - no new actions or other reminders pop up, so I don't know that it's time for the review. Am I missing something here?

Thanks,
David

[QUOTE=olderbrother;20449]I haven't found this to be the case. That is, when a review date that I've set for a project comes around, nothing seems to happen - no new actions or other reminders pop up, so I don't know that it's time for the review. Am I missing something here?[/QUOTE]

For this to work, your daily review needs to include looking at projects due for review. In Project View I just change the grouping setting to Next Review to see these projects.

I keep a Morning Review checklist in OmniOutliner. Here's what that checklist looks like:

[CODE]
- [ ] Process Email
- [ ] Empty In Box
- [ ] Empty In Folder
- [ ] Review Today's Calendar
- [ ] Empty OmniFocus Inbox
- [ ] Review active projects
Step through Active Projects due for review today
- [ ] Any projects to put On Hold or move to someday/maybe? (Be
draconian)
- [ ] Any projects that are stuck?
- [ ] Planning/clarity needed?
- [ ] True next action identified?
- [ ] Attach purpose, "success looks like", etc.
See GtD for notes on this.
- [ ] Review Next Actions Lists
- [ ] “Urgent” perspective
Group Available Actions by Due Date
- [ ] ”Important” perspective
Group Available Actions by Context, Show only flagged
- [ ] What important but not urgent thing will you do today?
- [ ] Read Bible
- [ ] Pray
[/CODE]

That's very helpful, thanks!

I was contemplating keeping lists like these in OmniOutliner, with a "Daily review" toDo in OmniFocus that links to it (along with a Somday/Maybe list, perhaps). But I wasn't sure---checkmarks don't automatically reset, that means keeping toDos in two different places. Can you say more about why you have it separate?

[QUOTE=anna;20478]That's very helpful, thanks!

I was contemplating keeping lists like these in OmniOutliner, with a "Daily review" toDo in OmniFocus that links to it (along with a Somday/Maybe list, perhaps). But I wasn't sure---checkmarks don't automatically reset, that means keeping toDos in two different places. Can you say more about why you have it separate?[/QUOTE]

There are a few of reasons why I keep these separate. Some of it is just inertia; I had these separate checklists before switching to OF. Another reason is that I don't think of these as separate actions, but as a routine that I work through all at once. Finally, during the review I'm constantly changing views in OF. If my checklist were also in OF, then I'd have to keep switching back to it. I suppose I could open a separate OF window to focus on the review checklist, but that seems like overkill.

As far as checking things off in more than one place, I don't have a daily review action in OF. I have calendar items for daily reviews. I also have a simple script that unchecks every item in an OO outline, which is handy for resetting these checklists. Here's the script: [ATTACH]286[/ATTACH]. I put the script in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/OmniOutliner Pro. Then I had it to the default toolbar in OmniOutliner.

Just to throw another idea out there, I used to use OmniOutliner checklists for reviews (daily and weekly), but recently I've assembled Automator routines for that purpose. These are mostly "Ask for Confirmation" pieces that talk me through the steps, but I've also arranged to have the routine open Mail to check that inbox, open iCal to check that, etc. When OmniFocus perspectives can be called up via Applescript, this will work even better.

[QUOTE=Craig;20490]Just to throw another idea out there, I used to use OmniOutliner checklists for reviews (daily and weekly), but recently I've assembled Automator routines for that purpose. These are mostly "Ask for Confirmation" pieces that talk me through the steps, but I've also arranged to have the routine open Mail to check that inbox, open iCal to check that, etc. When OmniFocus perspectives can be called up via Applescript, this will work even better.[/QUOTE]

That is a really great idea.

I'm experimenting with a third solution.

I just downloaded a program, Alarm Clock S.E., that lets me run a batch of different things at a set time. My goal is to come downstairs, open my PowerBook, and while I fix breakfast, have ACSE:

- log into my wireless network
- download my mail
- start my Internet radio station
- Open Firefox to my Freecycle Moderation page
- Open my OmniFocus Review checklist [this is an Applescript application I cobbled up]
- Open GCal so I can look at my calendar
- any other morning tasks I've forgotten.

If this works, I'll avoid falling into my "let's see if any cool stuff came through on my e-lists, instead of getting work done" trap.

--Liz

Curt,
How long does your daily review take each morning? Thanks.


[QUOTE=curt.clifton;20451]For this to work, your daily review needs to include looking at projects due for review. In Project View I just change the grouping setting to Next Review to see these projects.

I keep a Morning Review checklist in OmniOutliner. Here's what that checklist looks like:

[CODE]
- [ ] Process Email
- [ ] Empty In Box
- [ ] Empty In Folder
- [ ] Review Today's Calendar
- [ ] Empty OmniFocus Inbox
- [ ] Review active projects
Step through Active Projects due for review today
- [ ] Any projects to put On Hold or move to someday/maybe? (Be
draconian)
- [ ] Any projects that are stuck?
- [ ] Planning/clarity needed?
- [ ] True next action identified?
- [ ] Attach purpose, "success looks like", etc.
See GtD for notes on this.
- [ ] Review Next Actions Lists
- [ ] “Urgent” perspective
Group Available Actions by Due Date
- [ ] ”Important” perspective
Group Available Actions by Context, Show only flagged
- [ ] What important but not urgent thing will you do today?
- [ ] Read Bible
- [ ] Pray
[/CODE][/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Lightstorm;58589]
How long does your daily review take each morning? [/QUOTE]

It's highly variable, depending on how many items are in my various in-boxes and how many projects are due for review. It also depends on how much time I have for the review. Some days are crazy busy, so I just do a cursory review looking for fires or potential fires. I'd say on average I spend about 10-15 minutes on my morning review.

Curt, if you're out there, a question about this tip...

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;19958]
One tip, if you set review frequencies using prime numbers you can reduce the likelihood of multiple project reviews piling up on the same day. My active projects have review frequencies of 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, or 17 days. My on-hold and someday-maybe ones have review frequencies of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, ... weeks.
[/QUOTE]

Are you saying that if you just choose review frequencies with some quasi-random variation from the prime numbers on this list -- in other words, mix up those that require frequent-but-not-daily review among 2-3-5 and those that require review less often among 11-13-17 -- they will, over time, tend not pile up on the same day?

I'm about to invest in big mega-all-project review in an effort to build a daily/weekly GTD/OF review process I can stick with. Your notion of spreading out the active project review to an everyday, little-bit-at-a-time process seems reasonable. I'm just want to make sure I don't review everything today, only to see it all show up for review next Monday morning.

By the way, thanks for sharing your own system here and elsewhere on these boards. It helps me to build and play with your perspectives, if only to see what OF can do and how the various customization features work.

[QUOTE=mmblum;69496]
Are you saying that if you just choose review frequencies with some quasi-random variation from the prime numbers on this list -- in other words, mix up those that require frequent-but-not-daily review among 2-3-5 and those that require review less often among 11-13-17 -- they will, over time, tend not pile up on the same day?
[/quote]
I'm not Curt, but I can tell you that the least common multiple (LCM) of two prime numbers is going to be the product of those two numbers. So if you have two projects with review frequencies of 2 and 11 days, respectively, every 22 days they will end up being reviewed together. Contrast that with the case of review frequencies of 2 and 10 days, where every 10 days they will be reviewed together (because the LCM of 2 and 10 is 10), and you can see the difference.

You will also get the same effect if you choose a pair of numbers that are relatively prime, for example 4 and 7. 7 isn't prime, but has no factors in common with 4. If you do something every Monday, and something else starting on that same Monday and every 4th day thereafter, a quick check of a calendar will show that it will be 4*7=28 days (4 weeks) before those two activities happen together on the same day again.
[quote]
I'm about to invest in big mega-all-project review in an effort to build a daily/weekly GTD/OF review process I can stick with. Your notion of spreading out the active project review to an everyday, little-bit-at-a-time process seems reasonable. I'm just want to make sure I don't review everything today, only to see it all show up for review next Monday morning.
[/quote]
Remember, you can always adjust the date of the next review and/or the period between reviews for an individual project if things seem to be "bunching up" too much, or the attention needed changes. Doing any sort of regular review process gives you a big leg up over not doing them!
[quote]
By the way, thanks for sharing your own system here and elsewhere on these boards. It helps me to build and play with your perspectives, if only to see what OF can do and how the various customization features work.[/QUOTE]
Yep, after I first read Curt's post detailing his perspectives, I not only added many of them to my own workflow, I also went back and read every thread where he'd posted! It was time well spent. Of course, he's a fairly prolific poster, so it will take much longer to do that now than when I did it :-)

One more thing to help smooth out the review workload:

Say you've got a bunch of stuff that you want to review every 2 days, and a bunch that you want to review every 3 days. Every 6 days, all of it will be due for review, and other days you might not have any to review. If instead you split each bunch over the number of days in the review cycle, the workload is smoother. For purposes of illustration, let's say you have 40 items with a 2 day review, and 30 with a 3 day review.