What a lovely way to start your day – “Good morning, Beautiful”! This is how one of my current coaching clients is greeted every morning. The words aren’t from a loved one – although I’m sure that happens, too - but from her GTD® system. I smiled broadly when I heard this and soon started to think about the reasons why...
Firstly, the language is inspiring, positive, galvanising. It’s actually what she has called the reminder in her lists containing a set of daily actions to launch her working day. As such, it could equally have been called something much more prosaic such as ‘Morning checklist’, but isn’t her version just so much more engaging? I’ve seen many variations of morning routines practices down the years but none of them immediately made me think “Yes! THAT is the next blog”.
What I also like about the choice of words is that it’s an excellent example of creating reminders that sound exactly like your future self talking to you. Sometimes that’s all people need to know in order to create a good reminder in their GTD system. Keep it simple, I say, when their lists are fuzzy, cryptic or vague, and are slowing them down. What exactly would you say if you were telling your future self exactly what to do? ‘Good morning, Beautiful!’ is a little unorthodox but I bet it just makes you want to click on it first thing.
The reminder itself also highlights a common practice that comes up time and again in coaching; the daily review. Compared to its more famous big brother, the Weekly Review®, the daily review doesn’t get as much recognition in the GTD canon. It’s not a trademarked name like the GTD Weekly Review®. It doesn’t have its own laminated checklist in the materials. But it comes up again and again naturally in various ways as clients refine the way they use their GTD systems.
Even if someone has never encountered GTD before, the instinct for a daily review is usually there for knowledge workers. Looking at your calendar and inbox first thing are normal parts of most workdays that are surely only preceded by the making of coffee. However, once people have GTD implemented, the more comprehensive toolset that GTD gives them allows them to make what they do here more consistent, more systematic, more refined and more thorough.
I find that the easiest ways to frame and focus the idea of the Daily Review is to think of it as a mini-version of the Weekly Review. As such, the main ingredients will feel familiar;
- Checking your calendar for the day. As mentioned, this is intuitively there already for most people because, if the sun is up, then the clock is ticking down towards something. Checking the calendar also reminds you of the ‘hard landscape’ you’re working around as you weigh up everything else that might possibly happen today, which you do by…
- Checking your lists. This is where I usually go next after the calendar to get a feel for the priority tasks to complete in the white spaces of the day. People are often surprised when they are learning GTD and they hear of this kind of daily scanning of lists. It sounds too time-consuming because they are still in a place where their lists are new, incomplete and probably still quite rough around the edges. What they’re not seeing and experiencing is that once they are comfortable with GTD then their lists will be much more refined and familiar so scanning them and choosing a few things that will be priorities for the day is relatively easy.
(My colleague, Robert Peake, has written an excellent piece on the topic of creating temporary sub-lists from this sort of scanning. It’s also worth mentioning a common tool that wasn’t around in 2018 when he wrote that blog - Microsoft To Do. The Office 365 list manager app includes the ‘My Day’ feature, a way of creating a similar temporary daylist that helpfully keeps itself in check by digitally ‘evaporating’ each night and preventing itself from becoming overgrown and aggravating if priorities change as the day unfolds. Smart.)
- Emergency scanning your inboxes. In the Weekly Review you get clear on your inboxes and get them down to zero. I wouldn’t recommend this as a standard for a daily review because for many people that would simply guarantee a fast-track return straight back into the world of reacting to the ‘latest and loudest’ and not getting things done – the polar opposite of what we want for you. Instead, I see the engagement with your buckets here as what we call an ‘Emergency scan’ – just looking to see the urgent, nothing more. The trick is to consciously open your inbox knowing you’re in emergency scan mode. Keep your guard up, watch for fake urgency, and just touch what you have to. The rest can often wait.
Calendar, lists and emergency scan are the big three moves here but you might add more to your Daily Review as you customise and refine over time…
- The main customisation in my daily review practice - it’s actually the very first thing that gets done without fail - involves setting alarms for the day, which I’ve written about previously here. The value of this is that I’m not needing to keep half an eye, distractingly, on the calendar for the whole of the rest of the day to see what’s coming up next.
- I’ve seen clients who see the GTD Mind Sweep as a valuable and regular part of the start to the day, too. This makes sense because of the tendency of our mind to cook ideas in the sub-conscious overnight and serve them up in the morning. Many people experience some version of this and it justifies holding a space for it in a daily review.
- A final example of customisation that comes to mind was one mentioned by Spencer Hanlon in his talk ‘How to get the most out of GTD in a leadership role’. He looks at his higher horizons each day to make sure his compass is always tuned to the true north of his longer term direction. I like this customisation precisely because it’s not something that I see a lot, proving that the most value in using GTD comes when you really personalise it to what works for you.
Nearly all of the above can be seen as mini versions of what you find in the Weekly Review and, as such, the daily review shouldn’t be taking anything like as long. When I’m checking in with clients and it sounds like a daily review is taking longer than their first coffee of the day, then I’ll start probing for the reason why. Often, it’s because they’re going beyond what it is needed – getting sucked into email is a particular culprit - and a gentle reminder can help them avoid the trap next time.
As people who are pushing the boundaries of your own productivity and coming here regularly to think about personal productivity, you will surely have ‘start the day’ habits of your own, both old and new, that have become as vital as that first coffee. What are those things that help you start the day on the right foot? Feel free to share below.
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