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A weekly review is the habit of stopping once a week to look at everything you are working on. David Allen made it one of the core practices of Getting Things Done, where it serves as the moment when a scattered week turns back into a plan.
The trouble is that many people picture a review as an hour-long ritual with a cup of tea and a clean desk. It rarely survives a busy Friday. A short review that happens every week is more useful than a thorough one that happens once a month.
Why Fifteen Minutes Is Enough
A weekly review is not planning from scratch. Most of the work is already in your lists, your calendar, and your notes. The review only checks them against each other and decides what moves forward.
Fifteen minutes works when the review has a fixed order and a fixed end. You stop when the four steps are done, even if some things are still unsorted. Anything left goes into next week's review.
Before You Start
Choose one time slot and keep it. Friday afternoon helps you leave work behind for the weekend. Sunday evening suits people who like to start Monday with a clear picture. Monday morning works if your week depends on news that arrives over the weekend.
Open everything you will need before you begin: your task list, your calendar for the past and next week, and the place where you keep notes. A review slows down most when you go looking for things in the middle of it.
Step 1: Close the Week
Spend about five minutes on what happened. Look at your calendar and task list for the past week and mark what is done. For each unfinished task, make one decision: move it to next week, schedule it for later, or drop it.
Write down one or two sentences about the week. What took longer than you expected? What gave you energy, and what drained it? These notes are short, but after a month they show patterns that a single week hides.
Step 2: Clear Your Inputs
Spend about three minutes on everything that arrived during the week and was not sorted yet: notes on your phone, ideas in your inbox, things people asked you to do in messages. Turn each of them into a task with a date, add it to a list for later, or delete it.
The goal is not to do these things now. It is to make sure nothing important stays only in your head or in a chat thread.
Step 3: Check Your Bigger Goals
Spend about three minutes looking one level up: at your goals for the month and the year. Did this week move any of them forward? Is there a goal that has had no progress for several weeks?
This step keeps the review from becoming plain housekeeping. A week can be full and still unrelated to anything you care about. Noticing that early is easier than noticing it at the end of the quarter.
Step 4: Choose Next Week's Three Priorities
Spend the last four minutes on the week ahead. Choose three results that would make the week a success even if nothing else got done. Write each one as a result, not an activity: "send the proposal to the client" rather than "work on the proposal".
Then look at your calendar and find time for each of the three. If a priority has no time slot, it is a wish rather than a plan. When the three priorities have their places, the review is over.
A Review in Practice
A freelance designer does her review on Friday at four. She marks five tasks as done and moves two to next week. One task, a portfolio update, has moved three weeks in a row, so she drops it from the weekly list and adds it to her goals for the month instead.
Her inbox has six saved messages. Four become tasks with dates, one goes into a list of ideas, and one she deletes. Looking at her monthly goals, she notices that a new client project has taken all her time and her course has not moved in two weeks. She makes one of next week's three priorities "finish module three" and books two mornings for it.
The review takes fourteen minutes. Most of the time goes to the first step, which is usual: closing the week is where the decisions are.
Common Mistakes
The most common mistake is turning the review into a work session. You notice an unanswered email and reply to it, then another one, and twenty minutes later the review is still at step two. During the review, only decide; do the work afterwards.
Another mistake is moving the same task forward every week without asking why. If a task has moved three times, it needs a different decision: a smaller first step, a different date, or removal.
