Weekly review
A weekly review is a scheduled pass through your whole task system to bring it back in line with reality. David Allen puts it at eleven steps in three phases, and calls it the critical success factor for the method.
By Bohdan StefaniukLast updated
Why it exists
A task system decays quietly. Things get captured and never processed, projects finish without being closed, and a list you have stopped trusting is one you have stopped reading — usually without noticing when that happened.
The review is the maintenance that stops it. Not because reviewing is virtuous, but because a system you trust is the only kind that lets you stop carrying things in your head, and trust needs upkeep.
The shape of it
Three phases — get clear, get current, get creative — and eleven steps, from emptying your inbox to reviewing your someday/maybe list and deliberately making room for new ideas. Allen suggests every seven to ten days.
The full checklist, with what each step is actually for and where people give up, is at the GTD weekly review checklist.
Where it goes wrong
Two failure modes account for most of it. The first review is not an hour but three, because it is really a backlog cleanup wearing a review’s clothes — do that once, separately. And a review that happens “when there is time” happens four times and stops.
Sources
- David Allen — the official GTD Weekly Review checklistchecked 2026-09-01
- Getting Things Done — the power of the GTD Weekly Reviewchecked 2026-09-01