# The GTD Weekly Review Canon

> Why David Allen calls the weekly review the "critical success factor" of the whole method, what
> the three phases actually contain, and why the cadence matters more than the format.

## The claim: the review is the keystone, not an accessory

Getting Things Done rests on one psychological bargain: your mind will stop nagging you about
commitments **only if** it trusts that the external system holds all of them and that the system
gets looked at. Capture alone doesn't buy that trust — a list nobody reviews is just a graveyard
with better formatting. Allen is explicit that the weekly review is "the critical success factor"
and that people who fall off GTD almost always fall off here first: they keep capturing, stop
reviewing, watch the lists rot, and then stop trusting the lists — at which point everything moves
back into their head and the whole system collapses.

The corollary this skill enforces: a review that skims is not a review. Marking the ritual "done"
while the core steps went unwalked actively *damages* trust in the system, because now the lists
are stale **and** carry a false freshness stamp. Hence the hard gate: unaccounted-for GET CURRENT
steps always force an INCOMPLETE verdict.

## The three phases

Allen's own material organizes the checklist into three movements, in a deliberate order:

### 1. GET CLEAR — return to ground zero

- **Collect loose papers and materials.** Physical and digital strays: receipts, notes, downloads,
  screenshots, business cards. Everything into an inbox.
- **Get "in" to zero.** Process every inbox — email, notes app, task inbox, desk tray — by
  *clarifying*, not doing. Each item becomes a next action, a project, a waiting-for, a
  someday/maybe, reference material, or trash. The two-minute rule is the only exception: if
  acting takes under two minutes, do it now.
- **Empty your head.** A mind sweep: write down every new project, task, or nagging thought still
  riding in working memory. This is the step that converts psychic RAM into system entries.

### 2. GET CURRENT — make the system match reality (the mandatory core)

- **Review next-action lists.** Mark off what's done, prune what's dead, notice what's stuck.
- **Review the previous calendar.** Look back over the past week or two for missed commitments,
  follow-ups spawned by meetings, promises made in passing. Each becomes a captured item.
- **Review the upcoming calendar.** Look ahead so preparation happens now instead of panic later.
- **Review the waiting-for list.** Everything delegated or pending from others: chase it, re-date
  it, or drop it. Unreviewed waiting-fors are where other people's slippage becomes your surprise.
- **Review project lists.** The load-bearing step: every active project must have **exactly one
  next action** on a list. A project with none is a wish; a project whose next action is buried is
  stalled. This step is why GTD projects keep moving without daily replanning.

### 3. GET CREATIVE — lift your eyes off the runway

- **Review someday/maybe.** Activate what's become timely, keep what still sparks, kill what
  doesn't. This list only works if it's periodically culled — otherwise it becomes a guilt museum.
- **Capture new ideas.** With a clear head and a current system, ambition is safe again. Allen's
  point: creativity shows up *after* clearing, not instead of it.

## Cadence discipline

- **Weekly is the resolution of most working commitments.** Allen's observation is pragmatic, not
  mystical: most people's world shifts materially over a week — meetings compound, projects drift,
  promises accumulate. Daily is too granular to see project-level drift; monthly lets loops rot.
- **Same time, same trigger.** The canonical recommendation (echoed by every serious GTD guide) is
  a recurring, protected block — commonly Friday afternoon or Sunday evening — anchored to an
  existing rhythm so the review doesn't depend on motivation.
- **Timeboxed.** One to two hours. A review that regularly takes three hours gets skipped the
  moment a week is busy, and skipped reviews are how the habit dies. Better a 45-minute honest
  pass with steps explicitly skipped-with-reason than a marathon that happens twice and never again.
- **The review is steering, not rowing.** Forte's periodic-review framing and Allen's original
  agree: during the review you decide and route; you do not execute (two-minute items excepted).
  A review that turns into a work session never finishes.

## What "done" means

The review is complete when: every inbox is empty, every open loop found is on a list, every
active project has one next action, both calendars have been swept, every waiting-for has been
touched, and someday/maybe has been consciously kept or culled. That definition is checkable,
which is why this skill gates it with a script instead of a feeling.

## Sources

1. David Allen, *Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity* (Penguin, original
   edition 2001; revised edition 2015) — chapter on the power of the weekly review; the "critical
   success factor" claim; the two-minute rule; the project/next-action distinction.
2. David Allen, *Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done* (Viking,
   2003) — principles on review cadence and why unrenegotiated commitments erode self-trust.
3. GTD® methodology guides, gettingthingsdone.com (David Allen Company) — the official Weekly
   Review® checklist with the GET CLEAR / GET CURRENT / GET CREATIVE structure used here.
4. Tiago Forte, *Building a Second Brain* (Atria, 2022) and the PARA method essays (fortelabs.com)
   — periodic review as the maintenance loop of any personal knowledge system; weekly review as
   routing, not execution.
5. Doist, "The Complete Guide to Getting Things Done" (todoist.com/productivity-methods) — a
   widely used practitioner's walkthrough of the weekly review steps and common adaptations.
6. Cal Newport, *Deep Work* (Grand Central, 2016) and the weekly-planning essays at
   calnewport.com — weekly planning as the scale at which meaningful work is steered; the
   shutdown-ritual analogue of closing loops before rest.
7. Francis Wade, *Perfect Time-Based Productivity* (2014) — on why review cadences fail and how
   habit load, not intention, predicts whether a review sticks.
