What are reviews and why do them?
It is tremendously difficult to stay focused throughout the day if you are constantly worried that you are forgetting things. The solution to this problem is to force yourself to regularly review your tasks and projects. This way you can feel confident that you’re working on the right thing and not be distracted by thoughts of what you’re not doing.
If reviews are such a good practice, why doesn’t everybody do them?
Good question! The answer is that reviewing can be overwhelming. Seeing the big list of everything on your plate can make you feel sick to your stomach with thoughts of “Oh man, I need to get moving on that!” or “Oh, I can’t forget about that!”.
Rather than having those thoughts constantly, DailyBalance is geared toward you reviewing your Master List each morning and making a plan for the day. This is what we call the Daily Review. Once your plan for the day is set, you can block out everything that you decided to NOT do today. Knowing that you decided your priorities up front helps you stay focused and feeling in control.
More than just daily…
To be really productive we suggest weekly and monthly reviews as well as daily. The folders in the Master List let you apply the same blocking out approach as with the Daily Review. For example, you can review at the beginning of each week and use the “In Progress” folder to hold everything that you hope to work on in the coming week. With that done, you can block out the other folders when planning your days for the rest of the week. You don’t need to review everything in your Master List each day because you already decided what are the important things for this week.
Regular reviews are the best way to keep your lists up to date so that DailyBalance has an accurate representation of your priorities. Without doing reviews, your Master List will tend to get cluttered and overwhelming to look at. Things will hang out forever on your list because you haven’t thought through what is entailed with getting them done. Reviews are the process of thinking things through and deciding up front what really needs to be done now and what can wait.
Now, reviews aren’t a magic wand. They take some discipline in thinking through what is involved with the tasks and projects in your Master List. The toughest part is being honest with yourself about how much you can really handle. DailyBalance is designed to make this process easier and to help you to develop the practice as a habit.
If you are new to DailyBalance, try starting with Daily Reviews. In fact, we put a daily “Do a Daily Review and plan your day” task into your Inbox each morning to remind you to do this AND to guide you through the process. Click here to see how the Daily Review Assistant works. Once you get the hang of that, add in Weekly and then Monthly Reviews.
The following are some tips and tricks for doing the different types of reviews in DailyBalance.