#1 Mistake New GTD Users Make
Many years ago, I met this smart and beautiful woman in Las Vegas. We were both single and flirting with each other. She asked me what I did for a living and I said that I was blogging about productivity.
“You must be a GTD user too,” she said.
“Yes, I am. I doubt you are.”
Playfully she replied, “Excuse me? Are you doubting me that I don’t know what GTD is?”
“Yes I do. What’s the most important step in Getting Things Done?”
Only someone who is a GTD practitioner and follows the methodology on a regular basis would be able to answer this question. A few seconds later, she said:
“It’s the review step. Without it, the whole system falls apart.”
(That’s when I fell in love with this woman. We ended up dating for a few years.)
She’s right. The review step, which sometimes is referred to as the Reflect step, is the most important step of the whole GTD framework.
It’s easy for pieces of information, tasks, and reminders to get scattered all over the place. Organizing that is important (which is why it’s one of the steps in GTD) but reviewing everything is crucial to get yourself focused on the right things coming ahead of you.
The biggest mistake I see that new Getting Things Done users make is that they are not consistently doing their reviews. Out of the five steps in the GTD methodology, this is the most neglected step. Without the review step, you might end up focusing your time and energy on the wrong thing. That’s not productive, is it?
So why do people struggle with this step so much? Based on my experience, there are a couple of reasons why:
It can be very tedious the first few times you do it
It can take a long time to do (an hour or two)
You have to make it a habit which is already hard to do on top of everything else you have to learn