Concept
The weekly review
The weekly review is the hour a week in which David Allen's system is kept trustworthy: empty the inbox, check that every project has a next action, cross off what is done, add what appeared, and look at the calendar ahead. He calls it the critical success factor of the whole method.
A list the mind does not trust is a list the mind ignores, and then the open loops move back into the head and the anxiety that drives procrastination returns. Trust is maintained by review. Once a week, at a fixed time, the inbox is processed to zero, each project is checked for a defined next action, completed items are cleared, new commitments are captured, and the coming weeks are looked at so that nothing surprises. For a procrastinator the review does one more thing: it is where the reverse calendar meets the deadline, and where the Unschedule is read for how many thirty-minute starts really happened. Cal Newport's shutdown ritual is the daily version of the same maintenance. Allen is blunt that people who build the system and skip the review lose it within a month.
A real-life example
A translator in Izmir books the review for Sunday morning. In week three it catches a deadline nobody had written down and a project that had quietly stalled for want of a next action. A student uses hers to count starts on the Unschedule: five the first week, seven the second.
How to use it
- 1Book one hour, same time every week, and treat it as an appointment.
- 2Inbox to zero, every project a next action, done items cleared, calendar ahead checked.
- 3Read the Unschedule and count the starts; that number is the week's real score.