The weekly review is the single most important habit in GTD. Without it, your lists go stale, projects drift, and your brain starts holding things again. With it, you walk away each week knowing that every commitment is accounted for and every project has a clear next step.
This tutorial walks you through a complete weekly review using the guided wizard in Capture GTD. By the end, you will have reviewed your entire system and restored full confidence in it.
Prerequisites: You should have completed the Getting Started tutorial. You need at least a few tasks in your system — some completed, some active, and ideally a project or two.
Open the review wizard
Navigate to Review in the sidebar under the Actions section. You will see a grid of review types: Morning, Nightly, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, All-Time, and Project.
Select Weekly Review. The wizard opens with a progress bar at the top and step-by-step navigation at the bottom. Each page focuses on one part of your system so you can give it full attention.
A step indicator in the upper right (for example, “Step 1 of 7”) tracks your position. Use the Next and Back buttons to move through pages, or use keyboard shortcuts: right arrow for next, left arrow for previous, and Escape to exit.
Step 1: Celebrate what you completed
The first page, Completed This Week, shows every task you finished in the past seven days. Take a moment to scan this list. You did all of that.
This is not just a feel-good exercise. Reviewing completions helps you notice patterns. Did you knock out a dozen small tasks but make no progress on a major project? Did one area of your life get all the attention while another was neglected? These observations set the tone for the rest of the review.
Suppose your list shows:
- “Submit Q3 budget proposal” (completed Monday)
- “Schedule dentist appointment” (completed Tuesday)
- “Review pull request for auth service” (completed Wednesday)
- “Order new monitor” (completed Thursday)
- “Write team retrospective notes” (completed Friday)
Five tasks across work and personal life. Not bad. Click Next to continue.
Step 2: Review your context analytics
The Tasks by Context page displays a pie chart breaking down your completed tasks by context — for example, @Computer, @Office, @Phone, @Errands. This visualization makes imbalances obvious at a glance.
If 90% of your completions happened at @Computer and you have a backlog of @Errands tasks, that tells you something useful about how you spent your week.
Click Next to see the same breakdown by Area of Focus. Areas like Health, Career, Finances, and Family each get a slice of the chart. If Career dominated and Health got zero attention, the weekly review is where you catch that and decide what to do about it.
Step 3: Check your habits
The This Week’s Habits page shows your recurring habit completions for the past seven days. If you have habits set up (like daily exercise, journaling, or a morning routine), this page gives you a clear picture of your consistency.
Missed a few days of a habit? No judgment — just awareness. The weekly review is where you recommit or adjust your expectations.
Step 4: Fix stuck projects
The Stuck Projects page is where the weekly review earns its reputation as the cornerstone of GTD. A stuck project is one that has no next action defined. Without a next action, a project cannot move forward. It sits on your list looking important but generating no momentum.
Each stuck project appears as a card with a warning indicator and an Add Next Action button. For each one, ask yourself: “What is the very next physical action that would move this forward?”
For example, if your project “Home Renovation” has no next action, the answer might be “Call three contractors for quotes.” Click Add Next Action, type it in, and the project disappears from the stuck list.
If every project already has a next action, this page shows a green “All Projects Active!” confirmation and you can move on immediately. The page is skipped entirely when there are no stuck projects, so the wizard adapts to your actual system state.
Step 5: Spot stale projects
The Stale Projects page surfaces projects where nothing has happened in the past week — no tasks created, modified, or completed. These are projects that might be silently dying.
For each stale project, decide:
- Is it still relevant? If yes, define a next action to get it moving again.
- Should it move to Someday/Maybe? If the timing is not right, demote it so it stops cluttering your active project list.
- Should it be completed or deleted? Maybe you already finished it informally or it no longer matters.
Suppose “Learn Guitar” shows up as stale. You have not touched it in two weeks. If you still want to learn, add a next action like “Practice chord transitions for 15 minutes.” If the motivation is gone, move it to Someday/Maybe so you can revisit it later without guilt.
Step 6: Preview the week ahead
The Next Week Preview page shows everything due or scheduled in the coming seven days. This is your chance to see what is bearing down on you before Monday morning arrives.
Scan the list for:
- Deadlines you forgot about. A report due Wednesday that you have not started? Now you know, and you can plan for it.
- Scheduled commitments. Meetings, appointments, and recurring events that will eat into your available time.
- Conflicts. Two deadlines on the same day when you also have three hours of meetings.
This is not the place to reorganize your whole calendar. It is the place to make sure nothing will ambush you.
Step 7: Completion
The final page shows a Review Complete confirmation with a green checkmark. You have two options: Start Another Review or Return to Dashboard.
That is it. Your entire system is current. Every project has a next action. Stale work has been addressed. You know what is coming next week.
What you should feel now
David Allen describes the outcome of a weekly review as “clear space.” You should feel a sense of calm confidence that nothing is falling through the cracks. Your lists are accurate. Your projects are moving. Your commitments are tracked.
If you do not feel that way yet, it is probably because your system is still young. The weekly review gets more valuable as your system grows. A hundred tasks across a dozen projects is where the review transforms from “nice to have” into “essential.”
Build the habit
The hardest part of the weekly review is doing it consistently. A few tips:
- Pick a recurring time. Friday afternoon and Sunday evening are popular choices. Block it on your calendar.
- Start small. Your first few reviews might take 30 minutes. As you get comfortable with the wizard flow, it will get faster.
- Do not skip it. One missed review erodes trust in your system. Two missed reviews and your brain starts holding things again. That defeats the entire purpose of GTD.
The weekly review wizard in Capture GTD is designed to make the process as frictionless as possible. It shows you exactly what needs attention, in the right order, one page at a time. All you have to do is show up.