Hi there!
I will accept the 90-day review challenge. I’ve been on and off the review bandwagon, and still aim for a weekly and quarterly review. The tasks reminding me it is review time dutifully pop up in ToDoist (every Friday; end of the quarter), and I still run a weekly planning template and daily note system keyed to Quarterly plans. I’m a time-blocking devotee (with mixed success). But the reviews fall by the wayside.
I’ve taken on a management role, and my workload is out of control. My diary isn’t my own. Many days, I fight fires rather than get to the ‘important not urgent’ work. ToDoist is generating stress from task overload (I’ve started using due dates as a way to bring something back to my mind, but waking up every day to 20+ unachievable tasks is not fun).
So I need a review process more than ever. And it’s harder than ever to commit the time.
In case there’s any fellow travellers on the 90-day challenge, let me know.
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That’s what I call accountability. 
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Thanks for checking in! There is some progress. I had a few days off so could slow down the pace and review my daily and weekly prompts.
I really don’t like open loops at the end of the day, but the nature of the work, and the size of my inbox, mean that it’s often no longer possible to walk away from the job and feel like things are sufficiently tied up. I try to leave more notes to self, mini-progress reports, and re-entry points. I’m also trying to start living with an inbox of unread messages (the horror!), triage incoming messages, and manage the expectations of others about my turnaround times. The completionist/perfectionist in me complains a lot, but needs must!
I am a Todoist user, and have lots of project tracking in there. The one for my current role has totally taken over my life, and I live out of that for most of the day. I’ve toyed with using a different task manager for this role, but in the end, ToDoist fits me like glove. So I’ve instead crafted the project environment to be more functional by moving the c. 70 standing items into a Kanban view: columns for ‘daily routines’, ‘Urgent today’, ‘Next (this week)’, ‘Next (later)’, and ‘Waiting for others’. With the exception of the ‘routine’ items that repeat daily, no items have due dates anymore and that’s a lot more relaxing (this is a stupidly effective simple trick). The daily review now includes moving tasks between columns, and when a column empties out, I move tasks across. I’m trying for a local ‘pull-based productivity’ system (though that doesn’t stop others piling things on, sadly!).
Finding time for a proper shutdown routine remains the hardest – work in progress!
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Nice work!
Reminds me of a blog post I can no longer find on context logging. Someone had written about how they’d found huge benefits in logging their context and what they were trying when problem-solving throughout the day. Writing down their plans and how it went in tiny log lines helped them stop backtracking and let them take breaks without losing where they were.
Overall your process seems to align similarly to mine in many of the ways that count. Neat!
Keep going!
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