What’s in My Weekly Review

Originally published 14 April 2006

I’ve already said that I think the Weekly Review is the thing that makes the whole GTD system work. Recently I ran across an excellent checklist that someone had put together about what is in their weekly review. I started to think about my weekly review as well. I realized that I do a lot of the collecting and processing on a daily basis, and that I consider this separate from the weekly review. Here is my weekly review checklist so you can see how I handle this:

Weekly Review Checklist

1. Do a mind sweep and get all the stuff out of my head
2. Look at calendar for things that may need to be processed further
3. Look at upcoming calendar for things that may need action
4. Review my Waiting For List
5. Do a daily review
6. Review Bonsai:
   • Check my areas of focus to make sure they are all still relevant
   • Check my start this week list to see what may need to be started, and make these things projects
   • Check my Due this Month list to see if I am moving appropriately on these items
   • Check my someday/maybe and projects to assess load for the next week. Move things as necessary.
   • Look at my projects list; archive completed projects, ensure each has the appropriate thinking behind it (such as outcome, purpose, etc)
   • Look at Next Actions. Any project that does not have any gets marked as a Need NA
   • Review projects that Need NAs and create them
   • Check the NAs that are not linked to my to do list and link if necessary
   • Check the NAs that are linked
   • Sync

I really try to make sure that I only put things on my to do list for projects I want to move on in the next week. I have to limit myself in this way, or my to do list becomes overwhelming and turns into an ignore list.

Update June 2007

This process has not changed much since I wrote the article. I perform the review more often than weekly to keep myself on track, and I have expanded the Bonsai processing, but it still follows the same flow.