The Five-Minute Weekly Review
The Friday review is the load-bearing habit in GTD. If yours takes an hour, you'll skip it. Here's the five-minute version that survives.
A review you skip is worse than no review. Make it short enough to never skip.
Most GTD systems collapse at the weekly review. Either it grows into an hour-long ceremony, or you skip it. The fix: design the review so it can be completed in five minutes — every Friday, no exceptions.
The five-minute checklist
- Minute 1: glance at Done. Note count. Celebrate briefly.
- Minute 2: anything in Today that's been there >3 days → move to Next or delete.
- Minute 3: anything in Waiting → ping the person you're waiting on (one DM, one task comment).
- Minute 4: scan Someday → kill 3 things you no longer believe in.
- Minute 5: write the one thing you want to ship next week. Just one. Pin it.
Why this works
Habits collapse under their own weight. A 60-minute review is a project. A 5-minute review is a routine. The discipline isn't doing it well — it's not skipping it.
A five-minute review you actually do beats a sixty-minute one you don't.Open the demo's buckets grid and run a five-minute review on the seeded items.
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