Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: StephenPSmith.com

I have been reading the new book by David Allen, “Making It All Work“, and getting some really powerful insights. The main thrust of the book is that it expands your Getting Things Done practice by emphasizing a couple of points that I have been advocating here for the past year or so:

1. Get control of your system
2. Gain perspective on your responsibilities

Keeping things in context has become my own personal mantra, and one way to do that is with a comprehensive series of reviews. I personally recommend a series of 69 reviews over the course of the year:

• Weekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Annually

This may seem like a lot, but with some practice and by discovering what is most important to you these reviews do not take a lot of time and the return on that investment of time is invaluable. I use the weekly reviews to keep myself on track with the day-to-day work for my clients and personal projects. The monthly reviews focus on the larger scale of how my business is going and what I need to drill down on in the future.

The quarterly reviews are mainly geared toward measuring my progress toward the big goals, aspirations, and long-term success. These are the times that I really think about where I am headed and what is being done to get there. Last year I kept some fairly detailed notes during these highly introspective reviews and they came very handy recently when I sat down to look at what worked and what didn’t. This made my annual review go smoothly and provided a template for this year’s goal-setting.

Improving Relationships

One of my primary goals for 2009 is to expand and grow my new consulting business. Working for myself is an enormous challenge, with a fantastic reward - I get to work one-on-one with some really cool people. And I learn something new from every one.

Part of my plan to maintain and expand these existing client relationships - and get the new sales year off to a good start - is to schedule an annual review focusing on each of them.

During this review, I will be looking over the past year’s work with the client using this template:

• Thank them for their business, and tell them how important they are to me.
• Invite them to share their thoughts about the business we did with them - both positive and negative.
• Highlight the positive things we accomplished for them, and how we worked together to address their business issues.
• Brainstorm with the client on new products or services that I can help them to develop and market.

I am looking forward to building sustained relationships based on mutual trust and professional respect, and being able to ask for referrals to create these same powerful relationships with new clients.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/b6duq2. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen