If the weekly review is the cornerstone of GTD, the daily review is the doorstep — the small, sacred ritual you cross every morning before the day starts pulling at you. It is short, it is light, and it is the difference between drifting through your lists and walking into the day with a clear head.

This tutorial walks you through a complete daily review using the guided wizard in Capture GTD. By the end, you will have checked your hard landscape, surfaced what is due to come back today, scanned your next actions in context, and confirmed nothing you are waiting for has gone quiet.

Prerequisites: You should have completed the Getting Started tutorial. You need at least a few tasks in your system, and ideally one or two items on your calendar for today.

Why daily?

David Allen treats the calendar as “sacred territory” — the only place that gets to tell you what must happen on a specific day or at a specific time. Everything else is discretionary, which means you choose what to do based on context, time, energy, and priority in the moment.

The daily review is the small ritual that honors that distinction. It is not the heavy lifting of the weekly review, where you triage stuck projects and stale work. The weekly review is where the system gets cleaned up. The daily review is where you simply check in: Calendar, then Tickler, then Next Actions, then Waiting For. Four light touches and you are ready.

If you do this every day, you walk into your work having seen what the day demands, what is asking to surface, what choices are available to you, and where someone owes you a reply. That is enough.

Open the review wizard

Navigate to Review in the sidebar. The Review section is expandable — if it is collapsed, select it to reveal the review types underneath.

Select Daily Review. (As a shortcut on the web, you can also navigate directly to /review, which opens the daily review by default.) The wizard opens with a phase banner across the top reading DAILY CHECK-IN, a step heading, and the same Back/Next/Complete chrome you may recognize from the weekly review.

A progress indicator tracks your position through four steps. Use Next and Back to move through pages, or use the keyboard: right arrow for next, left arrow for previous, and Escape to exit. If you exit early, the wizard will confirm before discarding your place.

The same wizard is available on iOS and Android with identical chrome — the steps, the prompts, and the order are the same wherever you start your day.

Step 1: Review today’s calendar

The first page is your hard landscape for today: time-specific actions, day-specific actions, and day-specific information. These are the things that have a real claim on the day.

  • A time-specific action is something that has to happen at a particular time — a 10am meeting, a 2pm call.
  • A day-specific action is something that has to happen today, but not at a fixed hour — “submit the expense report before end of day.”
  • Day-specific information is context you want for today even if it is not actionable — “Sarah is out of office,” “release window is open.”

Read through the list. Notice what the day is shaped like before anything else competes for your attention. If something on your calendar reminds you of a quick prep task, capture it now — but do not start reorganizing. The point of this step is awareness, not planning.

When you have a clear picture of the day, select Next.

Step 2: Open the tickler file

The Tickler File page surfaces items you scheduled to bring forward today, plus anything overdue from earlier days that has not been handled.

A tickler (sometimes called a “bring-forward” file) is where you stash things that should not bother you until a specific date. The ticket you bought three months ago for tonight’s show. The follow-up you promised yourself you would send on the first of the month. The reminder to check on a project you handed off two weeks ago. None of these belonged in your active lists — but today, they do.

For each item, decide what it becomes:

  • Is it actionable today? Move it into your next actions or put it on your calendar.
  • Should it slip another day? Re-tickle it for a future date.
  • Is it just information? Read it, absorb it, and dismiss it.

If your tickler is empty for today, the page shows a friendly confirmation and you can move straight on. That is a good sign — nothing was hiding from you.

Step 3: Scan next actions by context

The Next Actions by Context page is your discretionary-time inventory, grouped by context. You will see sections like Calls, At Computer, At Home, Errands, Agendas, and any other contexts you have set up.

This is not a to-do list to march through. It is a menu. The four-criteria model from GTD says that in any given moment you choose what to do based on:

  1. Context — where you are and what tools you have.
  2. Time available — five minutes versus an open afternoon.
  3. Energy available — sharp focus versus low-battery brain.
  4. Priority — what matters most right now.

The point of scanning this list during your daily review is not to commit to every item. It is to pre-load your awareness so that when a free pocket of time opens up later, you already know roughly what is on the menu and can make a quick, confident choice.

Run your eye down each context. Notice anything that has been sitting too long, anything that suddenly looks easy given today’s shape, anything you forgot was even there. Do not rewrite the list — just see it. Save the deeper triage for the weekly review.

When you have scanned your contexts, select Next.

Step 4: Check waiting for

The final page is your Waiting For list — things you are owed by other people. Replies, deliverables, decisions, callbacks.

Run a quick scan with one question in mind: Has anything gone quiet that should not have?

For each item, decide:

  • Still reasonable to wait? Leave it alone.
  • Time to nudge? Capture a follow-up action — a quick email, a Slack message, a phone call.
  • Already resolved and you forgot to clear it? Mark it complete.

This step takes thirty seconds on a normal day. On the day you catch a forgotten dependency before it becomes a fire, it is worth the entire ritual on its own.

Step 5: Completion

Select Complete and the wizard confirms your daily review is done. You are returned to the dashboard.

That is it. Four light touches. You know what the day demands, what surfaced from your tickler, what choices are on the menu, and that nothing you are waiting on has slipped through.

What you should feel now

A clear head and a quiet calendar awareness. You are not over-planned — you have not turned the morning into an hour of triage. But you have looked the day in the face, and that is the whole job.

If you do not feel that yet, give it a few days. The daily review compounds. By the end of a week of doing it, you will notice it is shorter, your context lists feel more honest, and the small things that used to ambush you are surfacing in the tickler instead.

Build the habit

The daily review only works if you actually do it daily. A few tips for making it stick:

  • Anchor it to something you already do. Many people pair it with morning coffee, the first sit-down at the desk, or the end-of-day shutdown. Stack it on top of an existing ritual instead of trying to remember a new one.
  • Keep it short. The daily review is meant to be light. If yours is taking more than five or ten minutes, you are probably doing weekly-review work inside it — save the deeper triage for the weekly review.
  • Skip gracefully. If you miss a day, do not try to “make up” by doing two reviews. Just do today’s. The system is forgiving.
  • Choose the same time of day. Morning is traditional because it sets up the day, but end-of-day works too if it helps you shut down cleanly. Pick one and stay with it.

The daily review wizard in Capture GTD is built to be the path of least resistance. Phase banner, four small steps, simple prompts, no friction. All you have to do is show up.

Next steps