Most versions of the GTD weekly review checklist you can download are thorough and unusable at the same time. Eleven steps, no minutes against any of them, and nothing that tells you which three to drop on a week where Thursday ate Friday. So the checklist gets printed on a Sunday, followed once properly, and quietly abandoned by week three.
What follows is the same review with a clock on it. Three stages, twenty-five minutes, and a named thing you physically open at each stage. The times are not there to make you rush. A review with a budget gets scheduled; a review that takes as long as it takes gets postponed until it takes ninety minutes, at which point it stops happening at all.
David Allen's own material calls the weekly review the critical success factor in turning GTD into a habit that sticks, and the official version splits into three stages — get clear, get current, get creative — with a free PDF behind it. Those stages are right. What the PDF leaves out is what each stage costs you in minutes and which screen you have to be looking at.
What a GTD weekly review checklist has to close
A review is a reconciliation, and three gaps open every week whether you review or not.
The first is between what happened and what your lists say happened. You did four things on Tuesday that were never written down, and two things on the list got solved by someone else.
The second is between a project and its next physical step. Projects rot silently: a project with no next action looks identical to a healthy one in every app ever built, right up until you open it on a Wednesday and find nothing you can start.
The third is between the active list and the shelf. Things you can't touch this month sit in the daily view, get skipped fourteen times, and teach you that skipping is normal. That one damages your trust in the whole list.
Why the review is the first thing people drop when the week gets busy is covered in how to pick an app for GTD. This post assumes you have agreed to do it.
The three stages, and what you open at each one
| stage | minutes | what you open | the question you ask | what it fails on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| get clear | 8 | inbox, camera roll, downloads folder, paper notebook | what is this, and does it need an action? | anything needing thought gets re-read four weeks running |
| get current | 12 | project list, next actions, waiting-for, calendar for last week and the next two | does every live project have one physical next step? | a dead project looks exactly like a live one |
| get creative | 5 | someday shelf, logbook | what comes off the shelf, and what goes onto it? | skipped entirely, so the shelf becomes a graveyard |
The minutes are not evenly split, deliberately. Get clear feels like the big one because the inbox is visibly full, but emptying an inbox is mechanical work you can do half-awake. Get current is where the judgment lives, so it gets half the budget. Get creative is cut first and costs the most when it goes: five minutes on the someday shelf is what stops the shelf turning into a place things go to die.
The calendar range matters more than it looks. Last week catches the meeting that generated three commitments nobody wrote down. The next two weeks catch the trip you need to book flights for now, not the Friday before.
Run the review in 25 minutes
Set a timer per stage, not one for the whole thing. A single 25-minute timer lets get clear eat get current, which is the exact wrong trade.
- Start eight minutes on get clear. Every inbox you own is in scope for those eight minutes and nothing else is open.
- Empty each one to zero, giving every item a destination rather than a second reading. The processing sequence itself is in the GTD inbox post — the review only asks that you finish it inside the timer.
- Count the physical inboxes in the same eight minutes: the notebook, the receipts, Tuesday's two screenshots. What never enters the system cannot be reviewed.
- Start twelve minutes on get current and open the project list. Read every live project name and answer one question: what is the next physical step, and is it written down?
- Any project without a next action gets one now, or gets demoted. A project you cannot name a step for is either not a project or not live.
- Scan the waiting-for filter. Tick off what arrived. Anything older than two weeks gets a chase-up written as a real action with a date on it.
- Read last week's calendar and the next two weeks. Capture the commitments meetings generated and the things that need buying, booking or printing before they land.
- Start five minutes on get creative and open the someday shelf. Promote what you want to start this month. Delete what you have now read four times without ever wanting it.
- Finish in the logbook, reading what you completed. It is the only part with a payoff, so it goes last, where it pays you for the other twenty minutes.
The first three reviews will overrun, mostly on get clear, because the first pass clears a backlog rather than a week. By the fourth, twenty-five minutes covers forty or fifty live things.
The eight-minute version for a week that went wrong
Some weeks you get eight minutes on a train. Keep a degraded mode written down in advance rather than improvised at the moment you are least able to improvise.
- Two minutes: inbox only. Verdicts, no processing, no doing.
- Five minutes: project list only, hunting for projects with no next action.
- One minute: the logbook, read but not analysed.
You skip the calendar, the waiting-for list and the shelf. The shelf degrades fastest, so two short weeks in a row means the next full review needs an extra five minutes there.
Two counts worth writing down
The review tells you about the week. A pair of numbers, noted each Friday, tells you about the system instead.
Count the projects that had no next action when you opened them. Zero means you are writing actions properly during the week. Four or five, week after week, means you are capturing project names instead of steps — a rewriting problem rather than a review problem, covered in how to write a next actions list.
Count the inbox items that survived a second review untouched. One or two is fine. Six means the inbox is doing the job of a real someday maybe list.
Both take ten seconds and give the review a trend instead of a mood. A weekly review is itself a weekly habit, with the failure modes of anything you only do on certain days — tracking weekly habits covers why a rest day should not read as a failure.
Where init.Tasks fits
init.Tasks is a task and second-brain app on iOS, macOS and web that looks like a terminal, built so a weekly review has somewhere to look rather than something to reconstruct first.
Counts and progress roll up the tree, which does a good part of the get current pass before you start it: a project with nothing live under it reads as empty from the list, so the twelve minutes go on judgment rather than on opening things to check whether they are still alive. Start dates and deadlines are held apart, so that same pass reads real commitments instead of dates invented to make something surface. Start date vs deadline is the long version of why that changes a review.
The AI connection is coming in september: point an MCP client at it, choose read-only, and asking for every project with no open tasks replaces the hunting. A convenience, not a requirement — the review is a human job.
The beta waitlist is open, invites go out in september, and it is free while in beta. The feature list is the inventory of what actually exists today.
FAQ
What is a weekly review?
A weekly review is a scheduled pass over your whole system — inbox, projects, calendar, waiting-for list and someday shelf — to make the lists match reality again. It is not for doing work. It decides what the next week's work is, so that during the week you can trust the list instead of re-deciding constantly.
How long should a weekly review take?
Twenty to thirty minutes once the system is established: roughly eight minutes clearing inboxes, twelve on projects and the calendar, five on the someday shelf. The first two or three take an hour, because they clear a backlog rather than a week. Still an hour after a month usually means projects are being written where actions belong.
What is weekly review getting things done?
In Getting Things Done, the weekly review is the reflect step of the five-step loop — capture, clarify, organise, reflect, engage. David Allen's version has three stages: get clear (empty every inbox), get current (update projects, actions, waiting-for and the calendar), and get creative (revisit the someday list and add new ideas). It is the step that makes the other four trustworthy.
How to do a weekly summary?
Read your logbook for the week, write down two or three things that actually moved, and note anything that slipped and why. Five minutes, same place every week. The value is not the summary itself — it is that reading last week's at the start of the next review tells you whether a problem is a one-off or a pattern.