Weekly Review

The weekly review keeps your system trustworthy: once a week you empty the Inbox, look at every list, and check what you’re waiting for and what you’ve parked. iKanban guides you through it step by step and remembers when you last reviewed each list.

Start the review

In the sidebar, tap Workflow, then Weekly Review. The orange number next to it counts the lists that are overdue for review.

The steps

The review walks through these steps in order:

1. Empty the Inbox — clarify every capture until the Inbox is empty. Process Card by Card… opens the Inbox, where Card by Card takes you through one capture at a time (see Getting Things Done).
2. One step per list — every list except the Inbox and Someday/Maybe, with its open cards from Todo and Progress. Does every card still matter? Is there a next action? Anything to move to Someday/Maybe, or to delete?
3. Check Waiting For — anything to chase up, or that resolved itself?
4. Scan Someday/Maybe — has anything become current? Pull it onto a list.

At the end you see Review Complete. Start Over begins again.

In every step, tap a card to edit it in the inspector, or tap its circle to mark it done.

Move through the review

At the bottom of each step:

• Mark Reviewed & Next stamps the list with today’s date and moves on. On the Someday/Maybe step, it stamps your Someday/Maybe list. With a keyboard, Return does the same.
• Skip moves on without a stamp.
• On the Waiting For step, Next moves on.

Next to the buttons you see when the list was last reviewed.

Jump to a step

The step counter at the top right — for example Step 3 of 12 — is a menu. It lists every step; each list shows when it was last reviewed (or never) and a mark for overdue or recently reviewed. Tap a step to jump there. That’s handy when you only want to catch up on the overdue lists.

When is a list overdue?

A list is overdue when it has never been reviewed, or when its last review is older than your review cadence. The cadence is 7 days unless you change it.

Set the cadence in Settings › Review (on Mac iKanban › Settings › Review): 3 days, weekly, 14 days or monthly. The cadence is a setting of the device you set it on.

Review stamps

The stamps sync through iCloud, so Mac, iPad and iPhone agree on what has been reviewed. You can also stamp outside the guided review:

• A list’s inspector shows Last Reviewed in its Review section and has Mark Reviewed.
• A project’s inspector has its own Review section with Mark Reviewed for the whole project. See Projects.

Tip: a review that feels too long usually means too many lists. Archive the ones you’re done with — see Areas, Lists and the Archive.