Wednesday, February 1, 2012

My Thirty Day Challenge For The Month Of February: Work On My Daily Review Checklist Each Day

It's the first of the month and time to start another thirty day challenge. If you read my post from yesterday, you know that I completed my last thirty day challenge which was to walk for three miles each day. I continued walking three miles again today and started my new thirty day challenge which is to work on the second component of the white belt master - building mental strength with my checklist. I've decided to work on my checklist each and every day for the month of February for at least 30 minutes.

If you will recall from my previous articles and podcasts, I am a big advocate of getting everything out of your head and putting it into a checklist that you can refer to daily. I often described the football coach on the sideline with his football game plan on a big laminated card. This card tells him how to handle any game situation.

Likewise, the daily checklist I am putting together will also help me handle any situation I encounter during my day. I've been adding to my daily review checklist a little bit at a time and have started organizing it a bit better as well.

Here's a picture of my daily review checklist in it's current form today. Keep in mind, it's in progress at this point.

[caption id="attachment_1405" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="My GTD Daily Review Checklist starts to take shape."][/caption]

 

The core I have started with are the five phases of GTD workflow. Those are collecting, processing, organizing, doing and reviewing. I've started breaking down the exact steps I have to take to complete each phase.

The reason I feel this is important is twofold. First, if you break down everything you have to do into specific steps and write them down on paper, you get more stuff out of your head. Second, you define precisely what done looks like.

While both have their rewards, the second is extremely valuable to managing your stress. Once you define what done looks like - exactly - and you do it daily, you will know when work is finished.

If you know when work is finished, you can get on to the more important things in life like having fun!

Each day this month, I'll update you on the development of my daily review checklist. If you are a member, you can actually see my checklist template in google docs. If not, be sure and join today.

Related Article

Michael Kuhn

Black Belt Project: Build Mental Strength

4 comments

Quite interesting. I'm excited to see your weekly review and quarterly review checklists--as that is where I struggle the most.

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of thing I need to make everything click. I see that you have "empty read review" under "Processing." Does this mean that you actually read/review the things that are in there at that time? That seems to be something that would be done in the "Do" phase. Just trying to understand your process, thanks!

In that step, I just check my folder. Anything in there I might want to read or review, I put in my inbox.

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks!


EmoticonEmoticon