View Single Post
I've been thinking about how reviews work, and how I use them, and am wondering what other people think about my ideas.

(This was inspired by povlhp's post: His problem was that he did his weekly review late, and thus next time he wanted to do his review nothing was up. I'd like to do my weekly review on Sunday morning, but I don't always do it. I realized that, at least in my mind:
Each project individually being due for a review every 7 days does not express what I want. Rather, these projects are part of my weekly review, a process that should happen every 7 days.)

Why do different projects get reviewed at different intervals? What is it about projects that allows you to let some of them get looked at every week, but others you only need to think about every month or 3 or 6 months?

If you have projects that only get reviewed every 6 months, do you want them to pop up in your weekly review essentially "randomly"? Or, are they reviewed rarely because they are somewhat different than your weekly tasks and, do they require perhaps more thinking, or even just a different mindset?

What I'm doing right now is:
  • Un-pause every project that I should probably work on in the next week
  • Weekly review for projects that should be worked on "soon" (Some weekly projects are paused, some are not. They become paused and unpaused frequently)
  • Monthly review for projects that I don't think I'm going to have time for (most of which are paused)
  • Quarterly review for projects that I really, really don't have time for, and/or projects that are more vague goals (most of these projects are paused)
What I think would work better than the current system is:
Named review types. I have a specific, named list of types of reviews. The interval is set up in the review type.

"Weekly review" would be an entity that existed on its own, with a review time of "every week". A project would be configured with that as the review type. It would continue to have the same "last reviewed" time, etc.

I'm still trying to work out the semantics of how the review would work, and specifically what you would do to express projects that had been reviewed very recently - say, the day before your weekly review, or very late - weekly that you haven't reviewed in a month.

I think the best behaviour for this would be:
  • A weekly review is supposed to happen with a particular schedule. Every Sunday, or 7 days from the last one, etc.
  • When the scheduled review time hits, every project is flagged as "not reviewed". So the Review line item would have a number, which would be the number of projects you should review. Review would then show you a list of the review types, each with the number of projects yet to review, or the time of the next review
  • Perhaps a configuration setting: Don't review projects that were recently reviewed. ie: I could say, "When I do a weekly review, do not include projects that were reviewed within the 3 days before this review"

Does anybody else think this would be cleaner than the current system? Is it too complicated? Too hard to understand? (I think that with a good set of pre-defined but changeable types of reviews, this would actually be cleaner and easier to understand)

Do you do your reviews differently, such that this scheme wouldn't make sense?