Guides

How to do a weekly review in 15 minutes

Updated October 20, 2026

Short answer: Once a week, at a set time (Friday afternoon works well), take fifteen minutes for four things: clear what piled up, check who’s waiting on you and what you’re waiting on, look at last week’s and next week’s calendar, and choose the few things that matter most next week. It’s a trimmed version of the weekly review in David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which has three parts: get clear, get current, get creative.

The weekly review comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, where it’s the habit that keeps everything else trustworthy. The official checklist has three parts: Get Clear (empty your inboxes and your head), Get Current (go through your lists and calendar) and Get Creative (look at the someday ideas). The full checklist is thorough. Most weeks, a fifteen-minute version catches what matters most: the people involved.

Pick a time and keep it

Allen suggests early Friday afternoon, while everyone else is still at work, so you can still nudge someone or confirm a date. Put it on your calendar as a recurring block, and treat it like a meeting.

1. Clear what piled up (5 minutes)

Go through what came in this week that you haven’t decided on yet: emails, Slack messages you saved, notes from meetings. Decide each one, and write down anything still on your mind that isn’t written down anywhere.

2. Who’s waiting, and what you’re waiting on (5 minutes)

List the replies you owe and the things you promised, each with a date. Then look at what you’re waiting on from others, which GTD keeps as a Waiting For list: nudge anything past its date, and cross off what arrived. This is the part that slips most during the week, and it’s the part people notice.

3. Last week and next week (3 minutes)

Skim last week’s calendar for anything that left you a follow-up, and next week’s for meetings you need to prepare for or deadlines you’d forgotten.

4. Choose next week’s few (2 minutes)

Pick the two or three things that would make next week a good one, and decline or drop anything that’s gone stale, telling the people involved.

Keep it short enough to keep doing

A review that takes an hour gets skipped the first busy Friday. Keep the short version, and on a week when even that won’t fit, do step 2 alone: it’s five minutes, and it’s the one people would notice you skipped.