by Gretchen Miller, Director, Global PR & Social Media of Alfresco Software
“The weekly review is a psychic spring cleaning.” – David Allen
Buddhist practitioner Pema Chodron has it exactly right when she talks about how we shoot ourselves in the foot. The thing that is almost guaranteed, Chodron says, is that when things get especially difficult, we will experience a powerful urge to stop doing the very things that help us cope well with difficulty.
Think about that in the context of organizing your work – specifically with regards to all the different pieces of content that you are collaborating on with various teams at your company.
If you are overwhelmed by loads of content flying all over the place, your inner self-destruct sequence will start running a sub-routine that goes like this: Organize all this content? No way! I am way too stressed and busy right now to deal with that! Stress and information overload leads to abandonment of positive behavior, which leads to more stress, handled even less well.
Software to the Rescue?
Content management and collaboration applications were developed to help minimize this overload, to help you stay on track and maintain a clear view of where all this content stood. But even the best software can’t eliminate the needs for healthy work habits. Humans still need to have the skills and discipline to leverage the system successfully.
The typical response to a content-overload problem in a large organization is to throw technology at it. But what if you simply implemented a weekly content review with your project teams, just like David Allen’s GTD Weekly Review – either on a personal or team-wide level.
If you’re using Alfresco Team or a similar product, everyone could log into the team site, and walk through progress, deadlines and action items – all while marking up the content in real-time. At the end of the day, it’s great that everything is in the system, but the explicit review of all the content helps the team collectively prioritize action items, identify failures, and create a shared understanding of where a project stands based on the most critical artifacts of any project – content.
The weekly content review will help you make more progress, more quickly, and with more peace of mind. Ultimately – the content is going to be in the CMS, and it’s going to have all sorts of metadata and comments. But no matter how well organized your content is, mentally your team needs to have a clear sense of where your content stands today, and where it is heading.
As the David Allen quote suggests – the weekly content review is like a “psychic spring cleaning” – one where you can clear your mind of information and content overload, reduce confusion and stress, and move forward as a team with a shared, clear sense of goals, progress and next steps.
It doesn’t have to be a great weekly review; it just has to be a weekly review that is, you know, weekly. You’ll get leverage. Within a few weeks of reinstating this habit you’re going to find your team getting out of the weeds more regularly, and seeing the forest for the trees.
