I Quit Weekly Reviews. Here’s What Replaced Them.

About fifteen years ago, I came across GTD through a web article and decided to try weekly reviews. The first session or two went well. Then, without any dramatic decision, I just… stopped doing them.

That quiet collapse turned out to be the most useful data point. It wasn’t a willpower failure. The system had a structural flaw: the more notes you accumulate, the longer each review takes. Past a certain threshold, the cost of doing a weekly review exceeds what any reasonable person will absorb — and the system silently dies.

Why Weekly Reviews Break Down

GTD asks you to collect everything that has your attention. The collection habit is fine. The problem comes in the “process” step, and in the ever-growing “someday/maybe” list.

When you sit down for a weekly review and find 300 items waiting for you, the session takes half a day and leaves you mentally exhausted. You skip the next one. Then the one after that. Eventually the whole system stops.

This isn’t unique to me. “My someday list hit 1,000 items” is a common story in PKM communities. The design assumes that review sessions stay manageable — but they don’t.

Always-On Review

The alternative I landed on: stop batching reviews. Instead, review a little, every day.

This is what I call “always-on review.” The implementation in Obsidian uses the Spaced Repetition plugin. Add a #review tag to any note you want to revisit, and the plugin surfaces it at the right interval based on the forgetting curve. Rate it “Easy” and you won’t see it for months. Rate it “Hard” and it comes back in a few days.

Instead of one exhausting weekly session, I spend five to ten minutes each day responding to whatever the system presents. The queue stays manageable because the system decides what’s due — not me.

Review and Action Are the Same Thing

Using this approach, I noticed that review and execution aren’t actually separate phases.

When a note comes up, I add one line. That’s already moving the work forward. A tax preparation note that I’ve touched lightly every few months requires almost no effort when the deadline arrives. A note I open for the first time in a year requires rebuilding all the context from scratch.

There’s a simple reason for this: a note with something written in it is easier to open next time. The previous edit lowers the psychological barrier. This applies to administrative tasks just as much as creative work.

The Failure Mode: Over-tagging

Always-on review has its own failure mode.

If you tag everything with #review, the queue grows to 300 or 400 items — and you’re back where you started. My approach: actively remove tags from notes I’ve outgrown, and when the queue gets too long, defer everything to the next day without guilt. Sustainability matters more than completeness.

A pace of adding one new review item per week has worked well for me over time.

Beyond Notes: Deferring Decisions

One unexpected use: managing things I want to buy.

When something catches my attention, I don’t decide immediately. I put it in a note with a #review tag and forget about it. When the system resurfaces it weeks later, I’ve usually lost interest. The same logic applies to documents I want to revisit on an irregular cadence — too often for annual review, too rarely for weekly. SRS handles the scheduling automatically.

Why This Works Better in Obsidian

I tried versions of this in task managers. It didn’t work, because task managers can’t hold rich notes or grow links between ideas.

In Obsidian, when a note comes up for review, I can add a link to something I read last week, annotate it with new thinking, or connect it to a completely different note. The review session becomes the moment when knowledge accumulates — not just gets checked off.

That compounding is what makes the system worth maintaining.