How to do a weekly review as an academic
If you look for me on any Sunday evening, I’ll likely be found at my laptop catching up on my professional and personal life.
I set aside an hour on this day to complete my weekly review, a time for dedicating my head to archive and reflect on all of the items that have accumulated over the last week. It is also a time to plan the week ahead. I’ve completed a weekly review every week since my first year as a new assistant professor in 2014. I can count on both hands the times I missed a week.
A weekly review can make anyone’s life in academia more productive. Most academics have duties in multiple areas like teaching, research, and administration. Teaching moves at a weekly pace: there is one week to complete an assignment, lectures need to be prepared for the week ahead, grades need to be returned to students within a week.
Research projects also move on a seven day cycle. Meetings with research teams are scheduled every week, weekly check-ins occur with students and staff. Weekly or biweekly faculty meetings appear on the calendar.
David Allen popularized the weekly review in “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”, originally published in 2001. While only one component of the GTD method, the weekly review is a dedicated time to review project-level tasks and commitments.
Any weekly review protocol requires the right tools. For my analog plus digital style of work-life, this means both physical items and digital note-taking apps and task management systems.
I use a physical inbox for gathering small tasks I write down, papers I need to read, and forms I need to sign and scan. I will also write ideas for future research projects down as they come to me and immediately place them in my inbox. One of Allen’s mantras is “your head is for having ideas, not storing them”.
For digital tools, I use Todoist to keep track of projects and tasks associated with them. Todoist allows you to schedule dates for tasks, assign tasks to projects, and (one of my favorite tools) add colors to differently-themed projects. Automating tasks in Todoist is easily done. And yes, I have an automatic task to remind myself to water plants in my office every Friday.
My university uses the Google ecosystem for communication: Gmail, Google Calendar, Chat. This helps to facilitate productivity because meeting times discussed over email can easily become calendar entries. Instead of attachments with multiple files we save to a Drive folder to facilitate collaboration.
While these tools can help facilitate collaborative work across a university, disregarding the “leaks” and new ideas that accumulate over the week can make an academic quickly become non-productive.
This is where the weekly check-in comes in. The weekly review consists of three primary components: getting clear, current, and creative.
Getting clear
The process of getting tasks cleared in akin to filing away all the reminders to do things that have accumulated over the week. This is similar to dusting and sweeping all of your tasks that have crept in during the last seven days.
I maintain two primary physical items in my daily work: a small 5x7-inch notebook and a healthy supply of bright-colored Post-it Notes. During the week, I take notes for myself in meetings on paper in the notebook and write tasks on the Post-it Notes as they come to mind.
As Post-it Notes and other printed papers and forms accumulate, I add them to a physical inbox tray I have on my desk. I try to clear this physical inbox every two to three days, but the weekly review is a time to get serious about what’s written on these pieces of paper.
If an action on a note takes less than two minutes, I do it. If the action will take more than two minutes, I write it in the appropriate project in Todoist and schedule a day to complete it.
This two-minute rule is one of Allen’s most popular tips, and I also apply it to my email inbox during the weekly review. If an email takes less than two minutes to read and write, it gets done. If not, it gets filed as a task for an upcoming time.
I also spend a lot of time outside in my job, mostly outdoors with other people. Being outside means I also take a lot of photos that I use in my work. I use the weekly review to move any photos I took with my phone to a Google Drive folder. I rename the photos to make them easier to find in the future.
Getting current
I spend nearly all of this stage in my calendar and Todoist. I mark off completed actions in Todoist that I missed during the week. I look at the “hard landscape” of the week ahead and reschedule or reshuffle tasks and meetings if needed.
I maintain five email folders for each of the major components of my work: research, teaching, Extension, graduate program duties, and other administrative tasks. These folders often contain emails I need to get large projects done. A graduate student’s paper to read and comment on, a link to that one-hour online training I need to complete, those papers a colleague sent me on authorship that I need to consider adding to my seminar course.
If there are emails in these folders, it means I’ve already assigned them in Todoist. But the weekly review is a good time to clear these emails if their tasks have been completed. (The key is to never have more than 10 emails in each folder at a time to maintain a feeling of productivity.)
The calendar is the next major part of getting current. To make sure I have accounted for all tasks, I review the past two weeks and next two weeks of my calendar. Need to create and email an agenda for Thursday’s meeting with the Extension team? Make sure it’s on the calendar for Tuesday.
If there is a need to reschedule or cancel a meeting for the upcoming week, I will write and send an email or update a calendar entry. The biggest culprit here is overlapping meetings that require a schedule change.
It’s back to Todoist for the next stage of the weekly review. I maintain a ‘Waiting For’ list where I list the people and things I’m waiting for. For example, “Marcy: Review of tree growth manuscript”. Most of these have a date associated with them, so the weekly review is a great time to check in on these to extend their “due dates”, mark them as complete, or add any new people and items that come to mind.
A core component of the GTD method is maintaining a project list. A large portion of my time during the weekly review is spent reviewing each project, one-by-one, and making sure there is at least one action associated with each.
I currently have 46 projects that have a task associated with them. One project has one task: “Make reviewer edits to proposal” indicates I am simultaneously waiting for the agency to return comments from reviewers and my next task is to make the edits they request. Another project has 15 tasks. These tasks are a series of statistical analyses to try on a particularly pesky data set I’m working through. As Allen says, one of the key components to the GTD process is associate a next action with every project on your list.
The final step of getting current is to check the weather for the week. I live in Minnesota where any day has the chance of snow or being unbearably hot or humid.
Getting creative
The getting creative stage allows me to reflect on all the things I might want to do someday. If any new ideas for research or writing projects have accumulated over the week (check those Post-it Notes), here is the time to add them to my Someday/Maybe list.
I maintain five Someday/Maybe lists for each of the areas where I work: research, teaching, Extension, consulting, and writing. Tackling most of these items would involve creating a new project (e.g., start analyzing latest data for a new journal article). But some of these “wish list” items could be done in an afternoon if I ever prioritized them (e.g., create that lesson plan for a topic in my stats class).
Having a Someday/Maybe list has saved me in the past. Again, keeping archiving these on a list means I don’t have to think about storing them in my head. When my department head emails and says “I have $2,500 available for a student this semester and need ideas by Friday on how to spend it”, I glanced at my Someday/Maybe list. We hired a student and she researched video equipment, purchased it, and created some simple video content we’ll use in the future.
In summary, the weekly review allows academics to archive and reflect on projects and tasks that occurred last week and allows you to look ahead to the next week. The weekly review takes me about 45 minutes to complete. To get started doing a weekly review of your own, write down your next action and start its sentence with a verb:
Write down steps to complete weekly review.
