CONCEPT
The Weekly Review
Allen called it the critical success factor of GTD — the structured pause that recalibrates the entire system against the higher horizons of focus, and the ritual whose weekly tempo the AI-augmented workflow may have already outrun.
The weekly review is the ritual around which Allen's entire methodology pivots. Performed typically on Friday afternoons, it comprises three movements: get clear (process inboxes to zero, collect loose papers, empty any residual mental commitments), get current (review every active project, next-action list, and waiting-for item), and get creative (revisit the Someday/Maybe list and the higher horizons of focus). The review operates at a different tempo than daily work — pulling the practitioner from execution mode into evaluation mode, from local optimization into global recalibration. Allen insisted that without the weekly review, no other component of GTD could sustain its function over time. In the AI age, the review's indispensability grows even as its weekly cadence becomes structurally inadequate to the rate of commitment generation the tools enable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Allen discovered the weekly review's centrality empirically, through long observation that GTD practitioners who skipped it experienced progressive system decay