# How to run a weekly review *Last updated 2026-09-22 · Matthew Blode* David Allen’s GTD weekly review checklist: get clear, get current, get creative. Eleven steps, how long it takes, and how to keep the review short. ## The short answer > A weekly review has three phases, taken from David Allen’s GTD checklist: get clear by emptying every inbox, get current by reviewing your calendar, next actions and waiting-fors, and get creative by revisiting what you parked. No app can run it for you, but a short honest review beats a thorough one you keep skipping. ## Key takeaways - The review has three phases: get clear, get current, get creative. - Allen’s published checklist has eleven specific steps across those three phases. - Get clear means every inbox at zero, including the one in your head. - Every active project needs at least one next action, or it is stalled. - The David Allen Company suggests 1 to 2 hours, every 7 to 10 days. --- ## What a GTD weekly review is A GTD weekly review is a scheduled pass over your whole system to bring it back in line with reality. You are not doing the work. You are deciding what is still true: what landed, what stalled, what no longer matters. Copy this list into Today as a repeating task, or print it. Eleven steps, three phases. **Get clear** - [ ] Collect loose papers and notes - [ ] Get every inbox to zero - [ ] Empty your head onto the list **Get current** - [ ] Review next-action lists - [ ] Review the previous calendar - [ ] Review the upcoming calendar - [ ] Review waiting-for - [ ] Review project lists (every project has a next action) - [ ] Review any other checklists you keep **Get creative** - [ ] Review someday/maybe - [ ] Be creative and courageous: what would you add if nothing were in the way? The [official one-page PDF](https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Weekly_Review_Checklist.pdf) is the source. This page is the same eleven steps with timing, stall recovery, and how to keep the review short. David Allen calls it the critical success factor for keeping a system you trust. A list you do not review becomes a list you do not believe, and a list you do not believe is one you stop opening. For printable checklists and trigger lists that pair with this guide, use the [free GTD weekly review resources](/free-online-gtd-weekly-review-resources). ## The eleven steps, grouped | Phase | Steps | Job | | ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------ | | **Get clear** | Collect loose papers; get "in" to zero; empty your head | Nothing is uncaptured | | **Get current** | Review action lists; review previous calendar; review upcoming calendar; review waiting-for; review project lists; review checklists | Every commitment is accurate and unblocked | | **Get creative** | Review someday/maybe; be creative and courageous | The system can still surprise you | The [official checklist is a free one-page PDF](https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Weekly_Review_Checklist.pdf) from the David Allen Company. Two details are easy to miss: there are **two separate calendar steps**, backwards and forwards, and the third phase is Get _Creative_, which is the one people drop when they treat the review as tidying up. ## Get clear: every inbox at zero Empty every place things accumulate. Your task inbox, the physical pile, the notes app, the screenshots, the browser tabs left open as reminders. Then empty your head: write down every commitment that surfaces without deciding what to do about it yet. This feels unproductive and does the most work. Masicampo and Baumeister found unfinished goals cause intrusive thoughts during unrelated tasks, and that a specific plan removes the interference, but only for people whose plans were earnest enough that they acted on them. A vague note buys no quiet. Deciding the next step does. The older Zeigarnik effect is quoted more confidently than it deserves. Zeigarnik found unfinished tasks about 90% more likely to be recalled, but Seifert and Patalano document "frequent replications and non-replications", and their own first experiment found the reverse. The effect returned when subjects hit a genuine wall rather than being interrupted arbitrarily, which fits the review: the problems you got stuck on are the ones that keep surfacing. ## Get current: every project needs a next action Read your calendar backwards first. Last week's meetings generate follow-ups you never captured, and those are easy to lose. Then read forward far enough to catch what needs preparation. Go through your waiting-for list and decide, item by item, whether to chase, wait, or drop. Then **open every active project and confirm it has at least one next action.** A project without one is stalled, and stalled projects stay invisible until a deadline makes them urgent. ## Get creative: revisit what you parked Read your someday list. Some items have quietly become relevant and should move to your active lists. Some are dead and should be deleted. Deleting is the point. A someday list that only grows becomes a monument to guilt, at which point you stop reading it and the review loses its last phase. Then add the ideas you have been half-having. This is the only part that is not maintenance. ## How long, and how often The David Allen Company suggests **1 to 2 hours** for a thorough review. That figure comes from Kelly Forrister, a senior coach at the company, not from Allen in the checklist, and you will see it quoted as though it were. The same post is more useful on cadence: **every 7 to 10 days**, not strictly weekly, and Friday morning as the most common choice, with the advice to pick a time when you are "brain sharp, not brain toast." If Sunday evenings keep failing, the timing may be why. Ignore two numbers. The "Friday afternoon" version has no primary source, and the 2½ hours on gettingthingsdone.com is a paid audio product's runtime. Treat one to two hours as the size of a thorough review, and do not let it stop you starting. A review of a system that is already close to current is much shorter. The long ones are long because the previous review was skipped, so the quoted figure is closer to a recovery cost. ## Why people stop Two reasons, neither of them discipline. The review has no appointment, so it competes with real commitments and loses. Put it in the system it reviews, on a repeating date, at a named time. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 tests found that specifying when, where and how in advance has a medium-to-large effect on whether something happens. "Weekly review, Friday 9am" is that structure. "I should review more often" is not. The other reason: the system needs assembling before it can be reviewed. If next actions live in a filter you rebuild and someday items are a label you have to remember, step one of your review is tool maintenance, and that tax makes the review easy to skip. ## How Done Bear helps Done Bear has [GTD's lists built in](/gtd) as the navigation. It will not run the review or tell you what to drop. What it removes is the assembly step, because the lists the checklist asks for are the five views you already use: Inbox for "get in to zero", Upcoming for the forward calendar read, Anytime for next actions, Someday for the get-creative pass, and Logbook for what got finished. Emptying your head produces a burst of items, so capture matters here. It comes from web, desktop, iOS, a [Raycast extension](/docs/raycast), the [CLI](/docs/cli), and an AI assistant via [MCP](/docs/mcp), all into one Inbox. Over MCP you can also ask an assistant to compare your Logbook against what is still in Anytime, which tells you what you have been avoiding. No study evaluates the GTD weekly review as an intervention. The citations here support the mechanisms it plausibly exploits, not GTD itself, and anyone calling the review "scientifically proven" is overreaching. **When you might not need this:** under twenty commitments that fit in your head, a weekly review is ceremony. The shape is the same in other apps. Things 3 has these lists too, and the [Things 3 comparison](/things-3-alternative) covers where they differ. ## Start smaller than feels right Three phases, eleven steps, one recurring appointment. If that is a lot, run only get clear and get current for the first month. A short review you do beats a thorough one you keep rescheduling. ## Frequently asked questions ### How long should a weekly review take? The David Allen Company suggests 1 to 2 hours for a thorough review. That figure comes from senior coach Kelly Forrister on the official site, not from Allen himself, and the same post recommends a review every 7 to 10 days. Time your first three reviews and use that as your budget. ### What if I have not done a review in months? Do a partial one. Emptying your inboxes and giving every active project a next action gets you most of the value. A backlog of someday items you have not read in a year can wait for the second review, or be deleted unread. ### Do I need a specific app to run a weekly review? No. The review is a habit that no app runs for you. What helps is a task manager where the lists the checklist asks for already exist, so you can start reviewing without assembling views first. Paper works if your system is small enough to hold in view. ### Should the weekly review be a recurring task? Yes. Put it in the system it reviews, on a repeating date, or it competes with everything else for your attention and loses. A missing appointment is one reason weekly reviews stop happening, and it is the cheapest one to fix. ### Is the weekly review the same as planning my week? No. Planning decides what you will do. The review decides what is still true. They pair well, but if you merge them you tend to plan the appealing work and skip the honest audit of what is stalled. Run the review first, then plan from what survives it. ## Where this information comes from - [The David Allen Company, GTD Weekly Review (official checklist, PDF) (the canonical eleven steps, grouped as Get Clear, Get Current and Get Creative)](https://gettingthingsdone.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Weekly_Review_Checklist.pdf) - [Getting Things Done, GTD Best Practices: Review, by Kelly Forrister (1 to 2 hours for a thorough weekly review, every 7 to 10 days, most commonly on a Friday morning)](https://gettingthingsdone.com/2011/11/gtd-best-practices-review-part-4-of-5/) - [Getting Things Done, Episode #43: The Power of the GTD Weekly Review (David Allen calls the weekly review the critical success factor in making GTD stick)](https://gettingthingsdone.com/2018/08/episode-43-the-power-of-the-gtd-weekly-review/) - [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Masicampo & Baumeister 2011, Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals (unfinished goals cause intrusive thoughts, and a specific plan removes that interference, but only for people who go on to act on it)](https://users.wfu.edu/masicaej/MasicampoBaumeister2011JPSP.pdf) - [Cognitive Science Society, Seifert & Patalano 1991, Memory for Incomplete Tasks: A Re-examination of the Zeigarnik Effect (Zeigarnik’s original finding that unfinished tasks were 90% more likely to be recalled, and its history of frequent replications and non-replications)](https://apatalano.faculty.wesleyan.edu/files/2019/07/Seifert_Patalano_1991.pdf) - [Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006, Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes (across 94 independent tests, specifying when, where and how in advance had a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment)](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1) --- Every Done Bear page is listed at https://donebear.com/llms.txt. Any page has a markdown copy at its URL plus `.md`. Start from the map rather than guessing a path.