A weekly review is a clearing pass, not a reflection session. Once a week you empty everything that has accumulated, look at what is actually in front of you for the next fortnight, and then let yourself think about what you might do next. It is closer to tidying a workshop than to writing in a diary.
The original checklist is published free by the David Allen Company. It is eleven items, it fits on one page, and one of those items names your journal explicitly – which is the reason it is on this site rather than in a task-app blog post.
The Eleven Items
The published GTD Weekly Review checklist groups them under three headings. The item names below are the checklist’s; the one-line gloss after each is mine.
Get Clear
- Collect Loose Papers and Materials. Everything physical in one pile.
- Get “IN” to Zero. Process it – which includes your notebook. More on this below.
- Empty Your Head. Everything you are carrying that is not written down anywhere.
Get Current
- Review Action Lists. Cross off what is done; harvest what the doing produced.
- Review Previous Calendar Data. Last week, in detail. This catches more than anyone expects.
- Review Upcoming Calendar. Near and far. What does next week actually require?
- Review Waiting For List. What are you owed, and by whom.
- Review Project (and Larger Outcome) Lists. Each one gets a next action or it is not a project.
- Review Any Relevant Checklists. Whatever else you keep.
Get Creative
- Review Someday Maybe List. Promote anything that has become real; delete anything that has quietly died.
- Be Creative and Courageous. The one everybody deletes. Keep it – see below.
Six of the eleven are in Get Current, which tells you where the time goes.
Why It Belongs on a Journal Page
Item two is the one that surprised me. The instruction under Get “IN” to Zero is to
Process completely all outstanding paper materials, journal and meeting notes, voicemails, dictation, and emails.
Journal and meeting notes. In the canonical productivity checklist, the notebook is an inbox, and a weekly review that does not process it has not finished.
That single clause is a decent argument against the way most people run this. A weekly review done entirely inside a task app clears the app. Meanwhile the notebook is still full of half-formed thinking – the paragraph about whether the job is right, the three lines about a person you keep avoiding, the idea you had on a train. None of that is a task, which is exactly why the app will never surface it, and why it keeps arriving unbidden at 3am.
Processing a journal does not mean turning it into to-dos. It means reading the week’s pages once, and pulling out only two kinds of thing: anything that has become an action, and anything you have now thought about enough to decide.
Allen’s Own Preamble
There is a second published PDF, an essay-length version of the same checklist, and it opens in a register you almost never see in productivity material:
Honestly, this is what I do to keep myself sane and in control. This is not theoretical or out of some book. This is literally, blow-by-blow, what I do at least once a week.
Both documents are currently published and they carry the same eleven items. What differs is the structure: one groups them under the three phase headings, and the other runs them as a flat list. I am not going to guess which came first – the copyright dates do not tell the story you would expect – but it is worth knowing that the three-phase framing everyone now treats as the definition of a weekly review is a layer over a list that stands perfectly well without it.
The preamble also does something more useful than any of this. Allen tells you to put “do weekly review” in your calendar for the next four Fridays, and then to build your own customised checklist with reminders specific to your life.
So what follows is an adaptation, with his permission on the page.
Most techniques reach you third-hand, summarised by someone who read a summary. The originals are usually free, usually short, and usually contain one line that changes how you would run the thing. Finding those lines is most of what I do here. The newsletter is where they land first.
The Journal-Page Version
Thirty minutes, one spread, four written outputs rather than eleven checkboxes.
- Head the page with the date and the week’s number. Numbering them makes gaps visible, which is uncomfortable and useful.
- Empty, for five minutes. Everything in your head onto the left-hand page, unsorted, including the physical pile on the desk and anything sitting in an inbox. Do not organise while you do this.
- Read last week’s journal pages once. Mark two kinds of line only: things that have become actions, and things you have now decided. Ignore everything else – the rest of what is on those pages is not for today.
- Read last week’s calendar and next fortnight’s. Write down what next week actually requires, in the imperative, on the right-hand page.
- Write the four outputs. These are the page:
– Open loops – what is unfinished, in one list.
– Waiting on – who owes you what, with the date you asked.
– Next week’s shape – the three things that must happen and where they go.
– Ideas – see the next section. - Close the notebook. Do not carry on into planning. The review is finished when the four lists exist.
Steps two through four are Get Clear and Get Current, compressed. Step five is where the journal version earns its place, because those four lists are written prose in a notebook rather than fields in software, which means you can reread eight of them in a row and see something.
The wider loop this review sits inside – the goal, the weekly action, the daily check – is the loop this review sits inside, and this page deliberately does not duplicate it.
The Item People Delete, and Why to Keep It
The eleventh item on the official checklist reads, in full:
Any new, wonderful, hare-brained, creative, thought-provoking, risk-taking ideas to add into your system???
Three question marks, in a corporate checklist, under a heading that says Be Creative and Courageous. Almost every adaptation I have seen sands this into “review goals” or drops it entirely.
Keep it, and give it real space on the page. Here is the practical argument: a weekly review that consists only of tidying is a chore with no reward attached, and chores with no reward attached get abandoned in about six weeks. The ideas line is the only part of the review that produces something rather than filing something. It is also, not coincidentally, the part that most resembles ordinary journaling.
If nothing comes, write “nothing this week” and close the book. That is a legitimate entry and it stops the section becoming a performance.
When to Run It
Allen’s answer, in both documents:
A great time to do it is early Friday afternoon, as it will invariably surface small actions which could get completed if you can catch people still at work.
That rationale is specific and it is conditional. It assumes a weekday job and colleagues who are reachable. If you are freelance, shift-working, or the review is mostly about your own life rather than other people’s replies, it does not apply.
The two common alternatives, honestly:
- Sunday evening. Good for a review that is mostly personal. Bad if the week ahead is one you are dreading, because the review becomes the moment the dread starts.
- Monday morning. Good for planning, useless for clearing – by Monday last week has already blurred, and the small Friday actions have missed their window.
Pick one and keep it. The day matters far less than it being the same day.
How This Differs From the Other Reviews Here
Three pages on this site have a weekly section and none of them does what this one does.
The work journal’s own weekly checklist, for career evidence rereads your work pages looking for accomplishments and lessons worth having at review time. The reflective version, which mines the week for lessons works on your daily entries to find patterns and things learned. And the ten-minute bullet-journal version is three wins and three open loops, which is a fine short form.
This one is a clearing pass. It is not looking for insight and it is not asking how the week felt. If you want both – and they go well together – run this first and the reflective one afterwards, on the same page. Clear, then think. Doing it in the other order means reflecting with a head full of undone things, which is a poor state for noticing anything.
For the yearly equivalent, the once-a-year version is a different exercise again and is worth its own afternoon in December.
If It Keeps Not Happening
The weekly review is probably the most widely abandoned practice in productivity, and the usual response – moving it to a different day, again – almost never works.
Shrink it instead. A ten-minute version that happens is worth infinitely more than a ninety-minute version that does not. Cut it to three things: empty your head, read the week’s journal pages, write next week’s three. Add the rest back only if the short one has survived a month.
The rest of the formats are in the rest of the template library. This is the one that makes the others work, because the daily pages only pay off if something reads them.
A notebook nobody rereads is a fairly expensive hobby. One thirty-minute pass a week turns it into a system, and the checklist for it has been free the whole time. My newsletter carries more of this – original documents, read properly, with the useful line pulled out. If you would rather work through the whole practice in order, there is a course on Udemy that 36,700 people have taken.
