David Allen's Weekly Review: Get Your System Current Every Week

GTD runs in five steps: capture, clarify, organize, reflect and engage. The weekly review is the heart of the fourth. Allen's argument is that a list only takes stress off you when you trust it, and you only trust it when you know it's current. Most people fall off somewhere. They don't write everything down, or they never decide the next action, and a lot of them never step back to look at what they've collected.

Skip the review and you spend the whole week asking whether you're doing the right thing and what you're missing. Do it and, Allen says, two or three hours at the end of the week decide what needs focus and what can wait. That buys six and a half days of not worrying about it. People who meet him expect someone buttoned down. He says the review is what lets him follow his hunches the rest of the week.

Allen ties the seven-day rhythm to memory. He says he read years ago that people can rebuild the context of anything from the last seven days, and not much beyond that:

A seven-day review catches each item while you still remember what it meant. Stretch the gap and your notes have to carry more of the context, because your head won't.

The checklist comes from Getting Things Done, which splits the review into get clear, get current and get creative. Steps drawn from the book say so; the rest is Allen on tape.

1. Block an hour or two, every week. That's the figure Allen gave Tim Ferriss. He keeps no fixed slot himself and goes about every seven days, when ambient anxiety starts to creep in. He has seen people do it Sunday night, Monday morning or Thursday night. Early Friday afternoon suits a lot of people; late Friday doesn't.
2. Get clear before you review anything. In the book, the review opens by gathering loose papers and notes, emptying every inbox, and writing down whatever is still in your head. Allen's reason: until you've captured, clarified and organized your stuff, "you don't have the whole thing to review yet."
3. Read the calendar, then look ahead. Ask what you committed to, what's new, and what you need to know about.

The book adds the look back: last week's calendar, for follow-ups you owe. Allen still misses things at 80. He told Lunsford he had just been reminded to book flights for a GTD retreat in Norway, and that a thorough look at the coming calendar would have caught it.

4. Walk every project. Allen counts as a project anything you can finish in the next few months that one action won't complete. Most people have 30 to 100 once the personal ones count: new tires, the right VP hire, a school for the kids. Look at each one and decide what's next. In the book, no project leaves the review without a next action.
5. Give each list its own pace. Not everything needs seeing weekly. Allen reads his Someday/Maybe list every two to four weeks. The commitment behind a list sets how often you review it, all the way up his six horizons: actions, projects, areas of accountability, goals and objectives, vision, purpose. The book checks Waiting For every week and closes with get creative: look up at the higher horizons and ask whether a new project belongs on the list.
6. Do your own before the team's. Ferriss asked whether staff join in. Allen knows people who review with their families and teams, but you need your own private one either way. The group version reviews whatever has the team's attention.
7. Count a partial review. When the full review feels like too much, Allen compares it to exercise or diet. You don't have to do the whole thing. Do something that moves you in that direction.

Works best when your life is already out of your head. The more you've written down, Allen says, the more the review is worth.

Works best when you match the rhythm to how fast things move. At 43 and at 60, Allen sometimes needed something like a weekly review two or three times a day, to lift his head and ask what the afternoon was for. At 80, with a simpler life, he looks when he feels the need.

Fails when there's no system under it. With nothing captured, the review has nothing to walk. Even so, Allen says an hour a week helps anyone. Spend it asking what happened and what to do about it, on the work of your life, not zoning out.

Fails when it stops. Allen calls it probably one of the hardest habits to set up. Skip it and the system goes out of date, and you fall off the wagon fast. Planning the week is a separate job. Cal Newport's weekly plan does it, and his time blocking turns it into a schedule for each day.