If you use David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology to keep the wheels going round in your microISV, here’s two ideas to chew on for the fast-approaching New Year that I’ve been mulling over.

(If you don’t, but you’re looking for a way to get a lot more done with a lot less angst, I’d recommend it. – I’ll be putting up next week a GTD page at my newly redesigned 47 Hats web site you might want to look for.)

If you’re not doing a Weekly Review, you’re not doing GTD. Recently, I started really making an effort to do a Weekly Review of all open tasks, projects and objectives. I had thought – mistakenly – since I already obsessively track all of this on a daily basis, a weekly review would be unnecessary.

Wrong.

What I’ve found the last three weeks is that by doing a weekly review and by looking at all of my various projects and priorities from a less operational point of view, I could step back, look up and see if I was still heading in the direction I wanted to. I am – and that’s one less stressor in my life.

Here’s a very good post I found on how to do GTD Weekly Reviews, if you’re interested, and someone over at the GTD Forum has created a GTD Checklist in Excel as well. And, my friend Matt Cornell posted this great GTD checklist covering Weekly Reviews and more a few months ago.

Goodbye paper files? The nutshell of GTD is capture tasks into a system so they don’t fester in your head, process those tasks into next actions you can actually do, grouped by context and project, and information you need to store for reference, do the work, review what you do. I’ve gotten very good over the years in capturing my thoughts and to do’s, and getting things done by focusing on next actions.

But having multiple reference systems (email, bookmarks, files and paper) sucks. This year, I spent about $400 on redoing all my paper files (9 file drawers worth) with the ultimate in cool hanging files, just so that I had a paper system that matched my digital system.

But do I really still need a paper reference system? Do you?

I’ve noticed that outside of receipts for taxes, contracts and invoices and the like, my need for dead tree reference files has fallen off a cliff this year. Those wonderful, perfect, indestructible folders in their nice Ikea cabinets just sit there, with nothing going in but receipts, contracts and invoices.

I wondering – dare I say it? – maybe 2008 is finally the Year of the Paperless Office. Maybe, just maybe I can really go paperless this next year, scanning whatever few indigestible pulp bits come my way.

There’s a slew of good .pdf file management software out there – from veritable PaperPort Professional 11 for Windows to the new kid on the block, Yep for Macs.

Anyone interested in buying a set of indestructible hanging files, cheap?

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