A weekly review that actually kills tasks (not just grooms them).

Here's the distinction that matters: grooming processes the backlog — sorts, tags, reschedules. Reviewing interrogates it — asks each thing whether it still deserves to exist. Only one of them makes the list shorter, and a list that never gets shorter is just a slower version of the problem it was supposed to solve.

Left alone, a task list only grows — capture is free, finishing is bounded, and nothing removes the things that quietly stopped mattering. Deletion needs a scheduled moment or it never happens, because in the daily rush no single stale task is ever urgent enough to kill. The weekly review is that scheduled moment: the one time you're allowed — required — to cut.

The idea of a recurring review is the backbone of David Allen's Getting Things Done, whose weekly review exists to get "current, clear, and complete." But GTD's review is famously about processing to zero — and in practice many people process without ever deleting, ending clear-headed but still buried. The fix is to make cutting the explicit job of the review, not a side effect.

For every item that's been sitting untouched, ask one thing: is this still a real commitment?

If a task has aged for weeks with no movement, it is almost never "a thing I'll do soon." It's a decision you keep postponing. Age is the tell — work item age is the single most honest signal on your board, the metric the agile-for-one method argues beats nearly everything else, precisely because it surfaces what you're avoiding. A task that's three weeks old isn't waiting for time. It's waiting for a decision, and the review is where you make it: do it, shrink it, or cut it.

Give yourself permission to let the dead lie. Deleting a task you'll never do isn't failure — it's the review working. The relief you feel cutting it is the proof.

Run it in three passes, in this order:

1. Facts first — let the week read itself back to you. Before you reflect, look at what actually happened: what you cut this week, what you added, what's aged past a threshold, what you keep deferring, whether the big things moved or stalled. The trick, as flow practitioners put it, is to make the review respond to facts rather than reconstruct memory — memory flatters you; the board doesn't.
2. The cut pass — kill, shrink, or keep. Go down the aged items. For each: is it still a commitment? Cut what's dead. Break what's too big. Keep only what you'll genuinely pick up. This is the pass most reviews skip, and the only one that shortens the list.
3. Reflect and close — plus, minus, next. End with a short, honest reflection. Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Plus / Minus / Next framework is enough: what went well, what didn't, what you'll change. Then close the week — and next week, pick your three things from a backlog you actually trust, because you just pruned it.

Do this every week and something compounds: the review stops being a chore and becomes the honest story of how you actually work — which weeks you cut a lot, which ones the pile won, what you chronically avoid. That story is worth more than any single day's to-do list.

• Same time every week. A review that floats never happens. Friday afternoon or Sunday evening — pick one and defend it.
• Cap it at 20–30 minutes. A review that takes an hour won't survive a busy week. Facts, cut, reflect, done.
• Cut something every single time. If you finished a review without deleting anything, you groomed. Go back and find the thing you're avoiding.