A good chunk of my weekly review goes to processing my handwritten notes, and this is how I do it:
- During the week, I collect notes in one place. I write any task, idea, or insight on the daily pages in my planner.
- As the week goes by, I process some tasks by crossing off done items.
- At the start of the new week, during the weekly review, I read all my notes from the past week.
- I cross off done tasks.
- I do tasks I wrote that need a very short time, like sending a text or a reminder email. According to David Allen’s GTD, these actions take less than 2 minutes.
- I add digital reminders to my task app with due dates where applicable.
- I copy insights or good ideas, like a sentence I read and wrote or a post or a podcast idea into my task app in a proper list, such as “Instagram content” or “podcast content”.
- Or I copy ideas to one of my favorite note-taking apps: Google Keep and Evernote.
- As I review my daily pages and process them, I cross off every single word.
- I then write in a colored marker the word “Reviewed,” which means I will never read or even visit this page in the future, and it was successfully processed.
I genuinely enjoy this process, and it gives me an immense sense of clarity and relief. As David Allen says: “You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.”
As I wrote this post, I realized that I need to work on better processing my digital notes. I do this randomly, not systematically. I need to account for processing the digital notes, perhaps every month and see which of these notes are still relevant and which need deleting or archiving.