In my personal life, I have a lot of processes, their backbone being two recurring sessions: a "weekly review" every Sunday at 6 pm and a "monthly review" on the last Sunday of each month at 7 pm.
I have two templates (weekly+monthly) in a Google Doc that I'd make a copy of whenever I start a session. Adding something to one of these templates is a very powerful act because it starts a recurring weekly/monthly process that will take time in every following session. I tend to be very picky about adding a new item there, but still, as you describe in this article, the amount of stuff in there naturally increases without a conscious effort to clean it up once in a while.
I'm a big fan of Derek Sivers (https://sive.rs/), and his thoughts about simplicity and letting things go helped me a lot to make simplification a part of my processes.
What I do is pretty simple: I have an item in my monthly reviews that says, "every March and September: go through weekly+monthly templates, remove low-value stuff ruthlessly". It takes 20–30 min to do that, but obviously saves me a ton of time. It also makes me trust my system a lot better because I know I can add random stuff to my templates that sound good at a time (an insightful-sounding James Clear quote to tell myself regularly, a cool-looking productivity hack, etc.) and I know that I can remove it at the next cleanup. (Also, I don't always wait for these official cleanup processes to run; I throw out stuff as soon as they clearly seem unhelpful.)
We did the same at my startup, btw: we used pretty elaborate meeting agenda templates for each type of our recurring strategic and operative meetings, and in one of the wider-scope meetings, we had an agenda item to go through all of our templates and clean them up. I think we also did that at a twice-a-year cadence.
I think this should be a very important part of every company culture.
In my personal life, I have a lot of processes, their backbone being two recurring sessions: a "weekly review" every Sunday at 6 pm and a "monthly review" on the last Sunday of each month at 7 pm.
I have two templates (weekly+monthly) in a Google Doc that I'd make a copy of whenever I start a session. Adding something to one of these templates is a very powerful act because it starts a recurring weekly/monthly process that will take time in every following session. I tend to be very picky about adding a new item there, but still, as you describe in this article, the amount of stuff in there naturally increases without a conscious effort to clean it up once in a while.
I'm a big fan of Derek Sivers (https://sive.rs/), and his thoughts about simplicity and letting things go helped me a lot to make simplification a part of my processes.
What I do is pretty simple: I have an item in my monthly reviews that says, "every March and September: go through weekly+monthly templates, remove low-value stuff ruthlessly". It takes 20–30 min to do that, but obviously saves me a ton of time. It also makes me trust my system a lot better because I know I can add random stuff to my templates that sound good at a time (an insightful-sounding James Clear quote to tell myself regularly, a cool-looking productivity hack, etc.) and I know that I can remove it at the next cleanup. (Also, I don't always wait for these official cleanup processes to run; I throw out stuff as soon as they clearly seem unhelpful.)
We did the same at my startup, btw: we used pretty elaborate meeting agenda templates for each type of our recurring strategic and operative meetings, and in one of the wider-scope meetings, we had an agenda item to go through all of our templates and clean them up. I think we also did that at a twice-a-year cadence.
I think this should be a very important part of every company culture.