The weekly review: how to keep your task list honest

A weekly review is a fixed slot to look back, clear what is stuck and choose next week's priorities. Why it works, a 25-minute routine, and what Prior's review does.

5 min read

A weekly review is a fixed time, once a week, when you look at your whole task list and make it true again: finished work out, stale work out, next week's priorities in. Without one, a task list drifts away from your real life until you stop trusting it, and then you stop using it.

#Where it comes from

David Allen made the weekly review the keystone of Getting Things Done. His book, first published in 2001, treats it as the habit that keeps the whole system current. The review is usually described in three phases: get clear (gather loose ends and empty your inboxes), get current (update your lists and look at the calendar) and get creative (look at the ideas you parked). Allen's version is long. This guide gives a shorter one you can finish in a Friday afternoon. The method behind it is in Getting Things Done.

#Why it works

A new week is a fresh start. Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis (Management Science, 2014) studied Google searches for "diet", gym visits and commitments to goals. All rose after temporal landmarks such as the start of a new week, month, year or semester, or a birthday (abstract). They argue that landmarks open a new mental accounting period, which separates past shortcomings from the present. A weekly review makes a landmark of your own, at a time you choose.

Looking at progress helps you make it. In a 2016 meta-analysis of 138 experiments with 19,951 people, Benjamin Harkin and colleagues found that prompting people to monitor their progress toward a goal improved goal attainment (d+ = 0.40), and more so when the progress was physically recorded or reported publicly (paper, Psychological Bulletin). Most of the studies involved personal health goals, so the fit to task lists is an inference.

Writing the next step quiets the list. E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister (2011) found that making a specific plan for an unfinished goal removed its tendency to intrude on your thoughts, even before the goal was done. A review in which every project gets a next action does exactly that.

#How to run it

Pick a fixed slot and put it in your calendar as an appointment. Friday afternoon closes the week and Monday morning opens it. Either works if you keep it.

Here is a Friday review. A freelancer finds "Send quote to Dana", untouched for three weeks. Dana is still a client, so the quote gets Monday as a date. "Redesign portfolio" has sat there for two months: someday. The project "Client B" has no next action, so she writes "Ask Client B for brand files". Next week has a deadline on Thursday and two long meetings, so her three priorities are the Thursday deliverable, the quote and the files request.

#Mistakes to avoid

• Skipping it in busy weeks. Those are the weeks it matters most. Make the review shorter, do not drop it.
• Choosing too many priorities. Twelve is a wish list. Three is a plan.
• Reviewing only when you feel like it. Tie it to a fixed day and time.
• Only adding. A good review removes at least as much as it adds. If you never delete or park anything, the list grows until you stop looking.
• Skipping the calendar. Priorities that ignore next week's meetings do not fit.
• Turning it into a verdict on yourself. The review adjusts the plan. It does not judge the person.

#When it is the wrong tool

• When you finish your whole list each week. A quick look every day is enough.
• When your priorities change every day. A daily wrap-up fits better, and a short weekly pass on projects.
• When the problem is too much work. The review shows it, and it does not remove it.
• For a team's shared work. A personal review does not replace a team retrospective.

#In Prior

Prior has a guided weekly review that runs offline and uses no AI. Open it from the command palette (Cmd K or Ctrl K, then Weekly review), or from the Weekly review card on Today. The card appears from Friday at 14:00 through the weekend, until you finish the review or choose Not this week.

The review has five steps:

1. A look back: tasks done in the last seven days with a small bar chart, your focus time, habit check-ins, habit streaks and the projects where most got done.
2. Overdue and stale. Overdue tasks and tasks not touched in two weeks. Each one can be moved to a new day, marked Still relevant (which refreshes it), sent to Someday (which clears every date and parks it in the Backlog) or deleted. Deleting waits for the usual Undo window.
3. Projects without a next action. Active or planned projects with no open task you could start. You can open a project or type its next action on the spot.
4. Next week. The tasks due next week, then the best-ranked open tasks. Pick up to 3 priorities. When you finish, Prior plans them for next week's first working day so they lead Today that morning, with one Undo.
5. A summary: what you finished, what you cleaned up and the priorities you picked.

The lists are captured when the review opens, so rows stay where they are after you decide and show the outcome. Tasks assigned to someone else in a shared project are left out.

Prior's review is shorter than Allen's. It does not walk through your calendar or collect loose papers, so look at the Calendar yourself before step 4. To turn the Friday card off, go to Settings → Planning → Rituals. The command stays available.

Pair it with the daily evening wrap-up. See Weekly review for the step-by-step guide.