references/review_cadence_design.md
6.3 KB查看排版效果| 1 | # Designing a Review Cadence That Survives Contact With Real Weeks |
| 2 | |
| 3 | > Choosing the right horizon for each review, anchoring the habit so it fires without motivation, |
| 4 | > timeboxing so it keeps firing, and restarting after the inevitable lapse. |
| 5 | |
| 6 | ## Match the review to the horizon |
| 7 | |
| 8 | GTD's "horizons of focus" model assigns different altitudes to different cadences. The mistake to |
| 9 | avoid is asking one review to do every altitude's job: |
| 10 | |
| 11 | | Horizon | Cadence | What gets reviewed | What it is NOT | |
| 12 | |---|---|---|---| |
| 13 | | Ground — next actions & calendar | Daily (minutes) | What's next *right now*; today's hard landscape | Not a system audit | |
| 14 | | Projects & waiting-for | **Weekly** (60-90 min) | Every list, both calendars, every project's next action | Not goal-setting | |
| 15 | | Areas of responsibility | Monthly-ish | Are whole areas (health, finances, team) getting neglected? | Not task triage | |
| 16 | | Goals, vision, purpose | Quarterly / yearly | Direction: right projects at all? | Not maintenance | |
| 17 | |
| 18 | The weekly review is the load-bearing middle: frequent enough that loops can't rot, high enough to |
| 19 | see project drift the daily view can't. Skipping it and hoping the daily check compensates is the |
| 20 | most common cadence failure — daily views show *tasks*, and a system can be current on tasks while |
| 21 | five projects silently stall. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | ## Anchor the habit; don't schedule the intention |
| 24 | |
| 25 | Habit research is unambiguous that repetition after a **stable cue** — not motivation, not |
| 26 | importance — is what makes a behavior automatic. Applied to the review: |
| 27 | |
| 28 | - **Fogg's recipe:** After I [existing anchor], I will [first tiny step]. "After Friday's last |
| 29 | meeting ends, I open the review checklist" beats "do weekly review Friday" — the anchor is an |
| 30 | event that already happens, and the committed behavior is deliberately tiny (open the checklist, |
| 31 | not finish the review). Momentum does the rest; celebration seals it. |
| 32 | - **Clear's environment framing:** make it obvious (recurring calendar block with the checklist |
| 33 | linked), easy (everything in one place — this skill's scripts and checklist), and satisfying |
| 34 | (the COMPLETE verdict and health score are the visible reward). Habit formation takes weeks to |
| 35 | months of repetition — expect the review to feel effortful for the first dozen iterations. |
| 36 | - **Protect the block like a meeting with someone important,** because it is: it's the meeting |
| 37 | where you renegotiate every commitment you've made with yourself. |
| 38 | |
| 39 | ## Timebox it — the review must be cheap enough to repeat |
| 40 | |
| 41 | A review that costs three hours will be skipped the first busy week, and skipped once is the |
| 42 | beginning of lapsed. Working discipline: |
| 43 | |
| 44 | - **Target 60-90 minutes; hard-stop at two.** At the stop, gate what's done honestly |
| 45 | (INCOMPLETE is information, not failure), schedule the remainder, leave. |
| 46 | - **Process, don't do.** The two-minute rule is the *only* execution allowed. Everything else |
| 47 | becomes a next action. Reviews balloon when they silently turn into work sessions. |
| 48 | - **Let the scripts carry the clerical weight.** Scanning for loops and computing portfolio health |
| 49 | are mechanical; spend the human minutes on decisions (chase or drop? activate or kill?). |
| 50 | |
| 51 | ## Failure modes |
| 52 | |
| 53 | - **The guilt ritual.** The review becomes a weekly confrontation with everything undone, feels |
| 54 | bad, and gets avoided. Countermeasures: the someday/maybe list exists precisely so ambitions can |
| 55 | be parked without shame; the commitment auditor names SOMEDAY-CANDIDATEs so parking is a normal |
| 56 | verdict, not an admission of defeat. |
| 57 | - **The marathon.** Usually caused by processing debt (inboxes untouched all week) or by doing |
| 58 | work mid-review. Fix the input side (a 10-minute daily sweep keeps inboxes shallow) and enforce |
| 59 | process-don't-do. |
| 60 | - **The skimmed review.** All boxes ticked in fifteen minutes, no calendar swept, no project |
| 61 | touched. Worse than skipping, because it stamps stale lists as fresh. This is exactly what the |
| 62 | gate's mandatory GET CURRENT rule exists to catch. |
| 63 | - **The floating review.** No anchor, so it happens "when there's time," which is never. Re-anchor |
| 64 | to a fixed event and shrink the committed first step. |
| 65 | - **Altitude creep.** The weekly review turns into an existential goals session every week and |
| 66 | becomes exhausting. Goals live at the quarterly horizon; the weekly review only has to make the |
| 67 | system current. |
| 68 | |
| 69 | ## Restarting after a lapse |
| 70 | |
| 71 | Everyone lapses. The restart protocol that preserves the habit: |
| 72 | |
| 73 | 1. **No back-processing marathon.** Don't attempt to review the missed weeks; review *now*. Old |
| 74 | loops are still in the system or will surface in the scan. |
| 75 | 2. **Run a shorter pass.** GET CLEAR + the five GET CURRENT steps; explicitly skip GET CREATIVE |
| 76 | with a reason if energy is short. An honest 80% INCOMPLETE beats a fantasized 100%. |
| 77 | 3. **Zero self-punishment.** Missing-then-restarting is what successful habit maintenance actually |
| 78 | looks like in the data; a single missed instance measurably does not derail formation — quitting |
| 79 | in response to missing does. |
| 80 | 4. **Re-anchor before re-ambitioning.** Fix the cue and shrink the step; don't respond to a lapse |
| 81 | by designing a grander review. |
| 82 | |
| 83 | ## Sources |
| 84 | |
| 85 | 1. David Allen, *Getting Things Done* (Penguin, revised edition 2015) — horizons of focus; |
| 86 | the weekly review's altitude; the two-minute rule. |
| 87 | 2. BJ Fogg, *Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything* (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, |
| 88 | 2020) — anchor → tiny behavior → celebration; behavior = motivation × ability × prompt. |
| 89 | 3. James Clear, *Atomic Habits* (Avery, 2018) — cue/craving/response/reward; make it obvious, |
| 90 | easy, satisfying; "never miss twice." |
| 91 | 4. Phillippa Lally et al., "How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World," |
| 92 | *European Journal of Social Psychology* 40(6), 2010 — automaticity takes ~18-254 days; a single |
| 93 | missed repetition does not materially harm formation. |
| 94 | 5. Cal Newport, *Deep Work* (Grand Central, 2016) and weekly/quarterly-planning essays at |
| 95 | calnewport.com — multi-scale planning; the shutdown ritual as daily loop-closing. |
| 96 | 6. Tiago Forte, "The Weekly Review Is an Operating System" (fortelabs.com) — the review as routing |
| 97 | and maintenance, and why doing work inside it kills it. |
| 98 | 7. GTD® methodology guides, gettingthingsdone.com (David Allen Company) — official guidance on |
| 99 | scheduling, protecting, and recovering the Weekly Review®. |
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