Only yesterday, I wrote - "He declared the pipes appeared to be sound, but he had concerns about a valve."

Yeah. That wasn't true. A pipe is broken, where exactly, we can only be sure after judicious use of a lump hammer. Oh good.

Water is flowing into places it shouldn't be, so has been switched off while the hammers and drills are prepared. This isn't really the sort of thing that one can delay. I know from experience that water is extremely destructive to houses.

I have retreated to my office. My podcast partner, Justin is a practical fellow. I have no doubt he'd be with his tradesman discussing the relative merits of the "Smashit" versus the "ObliteratoRRR", I on the other hand, am the least practical man alive. My father once watched me drilling a hole into a wall and deadpanned;

"You look like a cow with a gun".

He was a wit, my old man. He was right, too. I'm not gifted in these things and approach any that I attempt with trepidation. I bought a water bottle the other day, and very nearly broke it trying to assemble the cap. The most constructive thing I can do is work, to earn the money that inevitably is going to flow from me to various tradesmen. Seems a good place to insert this:

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We're insured, so I daresay it will all work out in the end. My man, Yasser, reports that he's found the leak, and once in possession of the right bits, can repair it, and restore water to the house. The wall though - is sodden. My wallet is twitching in fear.

It's Friday, when I complete my weekly review. I've skipped the last couple, as Mrs L has been on leave. She's back to work on Monday, so some semblance of routine will return. Add in that it's my birthday and this is going to be more than a weekly review. It's a sort of reset.

Stu's Weekly Review

I use the Getting Things Done methodology, as designed and written about by David Allen.

This is how my weekly review works.

Where am I?

I start by gathering together everything. Dealing with everything in my inboxes. I have a physical tray, which fills during the week. There will be receipts, post, printouts, my daily task cards, all sorts of stuff.

Receipts. I either need them or I don't. If I do, I'll whizz them through my ScanSnap, which drops them into a folder on my DropBox. I'll then move those to wherever they need to live in my folder system.

I check the weeks task cards to make sure everything was done, and whether anything needs to be carried over. If there is, I'll type it into my task manager, unless I know it's already there.

All the rest gets put where it needs to be. Reference material to my filing cabinet. Live projects to my interim box. More about that later.*

I'll perform the same exercise in the digital world - going through my email inboxes, Slack channels and the like. I get to inbox zero here - translating anything that needs further attention into a task in Todoist.

These processes go most of the way to bringing me up to speed.

What's next?

I will now have a load of things in my inbox in Todoist. Mostly, these have been captured on the fly, so now I'll tidy them up. Add deadlines, assign to projects, even turn into projects. My focus is on making sure that things are either individual actions, or turned into projects containing individual actions. Doing that is a weapon against procrastination. "Get my Irish Passport" is a project, one that makes me sigh. "Print a bank statement" is something I can do.

This leads naturally into going through my projects, checking for next tasks, considering any changes, giving me a great overview of what's on my plate.

Next, I'll write up my analog weekly card. I'll date the days and write in appointments. I don't time-block, but I do get to see where my blocks are in the coming week.

That's where I stop. Over the weekend, my sub-conscious does its thing, and by the time I get to Monday morning, I've arrived at what things I'm going to write on my daily card.

*4 plastic trays in a plastic frame. The top 3 are alphabetical, A-H, I-P and Q-Z and the bottom one is for Sean - the novel. I use plastic wallets for ongoing projects, the latest one being "Water Claim". I label everything with a Dymo Writer. The trick is to keep these live - move anything finished into reference or the bin.