When was the last time you took a full inventory of all your open projects, next actions, calendar appointments, and waiting for items?

The GTD Weekly Review is an important way to keep on top of your work. In fact, GTD Founder David Allen considers it a “critical success factor” for achieving your objectives. For those not familiar with the practice, the weekly review is done at the end of a work week and consists of going through all your action folders, tracking projects, and otherwise keeping your workflow and space clean.

However, not everyone sees the value in committing to a weekly review. Some believe that the energy put into a weekly review is best spent actually doing meaningful work on projects. Is that true?

In a recent post, David Allen lays out the argument that the time spent in a weekly review is time well spent.

I asked if it was worthwhile doing the review, and he admitted that it was critical to stay on top; but that it was “work” to keep it up. It didn’t seem to be saving him time.

The truth is, it probably won’t save you more time–well, it will, but you will need that extra time to do the reviews and keep lists and categories of items current. Yes, you can get better and faster at how you do it. But it requires investment, no matter how good you are at it. As a matter of fact, the less you have time to do it, the more time you usually need to spend with it! 

For David Allen, no matter what system is used to keep track of work, without regular maintenance it will fall apart, forcing its user to try and keep track of everything in their head.

That’s why it becomes critical, once these are somehow objectified into an external system, that they be put in front of our conscious thinking process at least once a week, to get it all recalibrated to match our reality. And I guarantee that there are some intuitive “aha’s” and “I could’s” and “I ought to’s” lying dormant, only to be triggered by putting reminders and triggers about all the aspects of our life and work in front of our face on a regular basis. That could be daily, weekly, monthly, depending on the complexity of your life at the moment.

To learn more about the importance of the weekly review, please read the rest of his post.