The Weekly Review: David Allen's Method in 30 Minutes

Quick answer

A weekly review is a thirty-minute reset. You clear your inboxes, get current with your projects, and look ahead at the week. David Allen, who built the Getting Things Done method around it, calls the weekly review GTD's "critical success factor" — the one practice that keeps the rest of the system honest.

Done well, it takes about thirty minutes and runs eleven steps grouped into three phases: Get Clear, Get Current, Get Creative. You walk it once a week. Same day, same time. This article gives you the full checklist, an honest take on when thirty minutes is realistic, and a practical pattern for making it a habit you actually keep.

Step-by-step: the 30-minute weekly review

The canonical checklist comes straight from the David Allen Company and has eleven steps. It looks like a lot the first time through, but most steps are short — the review only feels heavy when capture broke down during the week.

Get Clear (about 10 minutes)

You start by clearing the channels that have been accumulating input all week.

1. Collect loose papers and notes. Business cards, receipts, sticky notes, anything paper-shaped on your desk goes into one inbox.
2. Get your inboxes to zero. Email, Slack DMs, voice memos, any digital inbox you actually use. The goal is to process, not to read — decide what each item is and either act on it, defer it, or trash it.
3. Empty your head. Open a fresh page and dump anything still rattling around: new project ideas, things you owe people, half-formed worries. Write it down so your system holds it instead of your brain.

Get Current (about 15 minutes)

Now the lists get aligned with reality.

1. Review your next-actions list. Mark off what's done. Capture anything new that surfaced.
2. Scan last week's calendar. Past meetings often leave loose ends — promises made, follow-ups owed, files to send. Sweep them into the active system.
3. Scan the next two weeks of calendar. Anything coming up that needs prep? Put the prep work on your list now, not the night before.
4. Review your waiting-for list. What did you delegate? What's overdue? Send the polite nudge.
5. Walk through each active project. For each one, confirm there's a clear next action. No next action means the project isn't really active — either give it a next step or move it to someday/maybe.
6. Skim any recurring checklists. Things like "before a flight" or "monthly invoicing." They trigger small actions that would otherwise slip.

Get Creative (about 5 minutes)

The last phase is the one most people skip and most regret skipping.

1. Review your someday/maybe list. Promote anything that's ready to move. Delete anything you no longer care about. Be ruthless — a stale list pollutes the active one.
2. Capture anything new and bold. New project ideas, risks worth watching, experiments you've been putting off. This is where the review pays you back: thirty minutes to think one level above the work.

You can download the official one-page checklist and tick steps as you go.

Common problems and fixes

The weekly review is simple. Keeping it is the hard part.

The review balloons past an hour. This almost always means capture broke down during the week. Inboxes piled up, projects drifted, nothing got written down. The fix is upstream: spend two minutes a day clearing email and capturing thoughts so the review isn't doing a week's worth of triage from scratch.

You keep skipping it. This is the most common failure, and the cause is usually that the review feels too heavy. Shrink it. A fifteen-minute version — empty the inbox, scan the calendar, check each project for a next action — beats nothing. Once the shorter version is automatic, add steps back in.

The review becomes a planning marathon. A weekly review is for orientation, not for scheduling every minute of next week. Cal Newport plans his week on Monday morning as a separate practice from his review — different inputs, different output. Decide the shape of your week during the review; decide the shape of each day at the start of that day.

You forget which day is yours. Pick one — Friday afternoon and Monday morning are the two strongest options — and put it on the calendar as a recurring event. HBR research on productivity habits shows that behaviors stick when anchored to a stable cue. A peer-reviewed study on workplace habits found that consistency at the weekly level correlated more strongly with habit strength than day-to-day perfection. Translation: doing the review every Friday at four beats doing it sporadically every day.

The review feels pointless because nothing changes. If you finish without at least one decision — what to drop, what to push back, what to ship sooner — the review didn't do its job. Force a small change every time, even a tiny one. Momentum compounds.

Doing this with Pomlo

A weekly review only works on honest inputs. If you can't see where the last week actually went, the "get current" step is guesswork. This is where a time tracker pays for itself.

Pomlo is built around the small, recurring loops that make a review easy. You start and stop a timer with one tap so yesterday's hours close cleanly. Time is grouped by projects and clients, so when you walk each project on Friday, the hours are already organized — you don't dig for them. The weekly report shows the gap between intended and actual time per project in a single view, and that gap is often the most useful input to the next week's decisions. If you run focus sessions or pomodoros, those show up too, so you can see whether the deep-work blocks you planned last week actually happened. (For more on planning those blocks, see our step-by-step time-blocking guide.)

A time tracker doesn't run the review for you. Those thirty minutes are still yours. What it does is make the data behind the review trustworthy, which means the decisions you make next are based on what really happened, not on what you remember. Pomlo runs on iOS, Android, and the web, in sync. Try it on the App Store or Google Play.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a GTD weekly review really take?

Thirty minutes is realistic when you stayed roughly current during the week — inboxes near zero, captures written down. If you skipped a week or two, the first session back may run sixty to ninety minutes because you're processing arrears before you can review. Plan for thirty, accept that occasional weeks will run longer, and don't skip the next one.

What day is best for the weekly review?

Friday afternoon and Monday morning are the two strongest options. Friday lets you close the week with a clear head and start Monday already planned. Monday lets you incorporate weekend thinking and fresh context. Pick one, put it on the calendar, and protect that slot — the day matters less than doing it on the same day every week.

Do I need David Allen's full GTD system to do a weekly review?

No. The weekly review is portable. If you keep a task list, a calendar, and any kind of project tracking, you can run the Get Clear, Get Current, Get Creative pass. You don't need GTD's reference filing, contexts, or someday/maybe lists to benefit — though you'll get more out of the review the more of your system feeds into it.

What if I keep skipping the weekly review?

The most common reason is that the review feels heavy. Shrink it. A fifteen-minute version — empty the inbox, scan the calendar, check each project for a next action — still beats nothing. Once the shorter version is automatic, add steps back. Skipping happens when the review competes with the work; make the slot recurring so the decision is already made.

A small commitment

The weekly review is a small bill for the clarity it returns. Thirty minutes once a week buys you a system that doesn't leak — projects with clear next actions, a calendar you trust, a head that isn't holding everything at once. Schedule a recurring slot this week and run the eleven steps once. If it felt heavy, cut it shorter next time. If it felt useful, you won't need convincing to come back.

For more on focus and habit practices, browse the articles index.