Weekly Review Google Sheets Template (GTD + Carry-Over)
A free Google Sheets weekly review template with the canonical 11-step GTD checklist, auto-populated wins and misses, a next-week priority block, and a 12-week reflection heatmap
A weekly review Google Sheets template works best when it does four jobs in one tab: walks you through the canonical 11-step GTD weekly review as checkboxes, auto-pulls last week's wins and misses from your habit and task log, holds three priorities for next week with carry-over from unfinished ones, and shows a 12-week reflection heatmap so you can see how consistent you actually are. The template below does all four, and you can copy it in one click.
I have been doing a Friday weekly review since October 2024. It started as a 15-minute journal in Notion, then moved to a Google Doc, then to a Google Sheet in April 2025 when I realized I wanted the last twelve reviews visible on one screen. As of this Friday, July 17 2026, I have logged 91 consecutive weekly reviews from my desk in Bangalore. Nine of those were done in airports, three were done on the phone during travel, and exactly one was done on a Monday because I flew back from Delhi at 2am on a Friday night.
The reason the streak survived is that I stopped rebuilding the review from a blank page. Blank pages are where reviews go to die. Instead I built a sheet that already knows what happened last week, already remembers the priorities I set the previous Friday, and already draws a heatmap of my recent consistency. All I have to do on Friday evening is walk down the checklist, look at what the sheet is showing me, and type three priorities for the coming week.
The template below is exactly that sheet, minus my personal data. It ties into the same habit tracker template I use every day, so the wins and misses column populates itself through a QUERY formula. If you do not have that habit tracker yet, the sheet still works, you just fill in wins and misses by hand until you connect a source. Either way, the 11-step GTD checklist, the carry-over logic, and the 12-week heatmap all work out of the box.
Copy the weekly review sheet
Use the live template if you would rather start from a finished version than build the QUERY formulas and heatmap by hand. It includes the full 11-step GTD checklist, a wins and misses rollup, a next-week priority block with automatic carry-over, and a 12-week reflection heatmap.
The 11-Step GTD Weekly Review Checklist
The spine of the sheet is the canonical David Allen weekly review, exactly the eleven steps from Getting Things Done. I did not invent this order, and I did not shorten it. Every attempt I made to trim the list ended with me quietly skipping the step I liked least, which was usually the one I needed the most. Now the sheet forces me to at least look at each one.
Column A holds the step number, column B holds the label, and column C is a checkbox. The eleven rows are: collect loose papers and materials, get in to zero, empty your head, review action lists, review previous calendar week, review upcoming calendar, review waiting-for list, review project and larger outcome lists, review any relevant checklists, review someday-maybe list, and be creative and courageous. That last one always feels soft, but skipping it is how a review turns into a status update instead of a reset.
The checkbox column has a small formula next to it in column D that shows how many of the eleven steps you have checked off this week. It is just =COUNTIF(C2:C12,TRUE)&" of 11 done" and it renders in row 1 as your weekly progress badge. The rule I gave myself is that the review does not count in my streak unless the badge reads 11 of 11 done. That single number is what took my completion rate from roughly 60 percent of Fridays to the 91 in a row I have now.
Wins and Misses: Auto-Pulled from Last Week
The block that changed my review the most is the wins and misses rollup. Before I built it, the review always started with the question, what actually happened this week, and I would sit there for four minutes trying to remember Tuesday. Now the sheet answers that question for me before I open it.
The wins column is a QUERY formula that pulls from the daily log tab of my habit tracker. The formula is =QUERY(HabitLog!A:L, "select A, L where A >= date '"&TEXT(A1-7,"yyyy-mm-dd")&"' and L >= 0.8 order by A desc", 1) and it returns every day in the last seven with a completion rate of 80 percent or higher. Those are my wins, in date order, without me having to remember anything. The 0.8 threshold is a personal choice, you can bump it up or down.
The misses column is the mirror image. Same QUERY, same date range, but L less than 0.5. Those are the days where fewer than half of my habits happened. They are almost always the days I want to look at hardest, because misses are where the actual signal lives. A win week where every day was 100 percent is nice to see but rarely teaches me anything I did not already know.
The QUERY formula does not care what feeds it. If you keep tasks in another Google Sheet, or export them from Mursa, Todoist, or Asana, the sheet will pull from that source just as easily. All you need is a column with a date and a column with a numeric completion or count. Change the sheet name and the two column letters in the QUERY string and you are done.
Three Priorities for Next Week with Carry-Over Logic
Three is the number I settled on after I tried five, then seven, then one, and finally three. Five was too many, one was too fragile, three is the number that survives a bad Wednesday. The priority block sits directly under the wins and misses rollup so I can literally see what happened before I decide what should happen next.
The three cells for next week are just three text inputs, but each of them has a done checkbox next to it. When Friday comes around a week later, the carry-over formula reads last week's priorities and their done checkboxes. Anything that is unchecked gets prefilled into this week's block, on the top row, with a small carry symbol next to it. Anything that is checked disappears and the row starts fresh.
The formula that does the carry-over lives in the priority cells themselves. It is =IFERROR(IF(INDEX(History!D:D, MATCH(A1-7,History!A:A,0)+n)=FALSE, "↺ "&INDEX(History!C:C, MATCH(A1-7,History!A:A,0)+n), ""), "") where n is 0, 1, or 2 for the three priority slots. Every completed review appends a row to the History tab, which is what MATCH is looking up. If you copy the template, this is already wired, you do not need to touch it.
The rule I hold myself to is that any priority that carries over twice must either be broken down into a smaller version or killed. Two carry-overs is the sheet politely telling me the priority as written is either too big, unclear, or something I do not actually want to do. Killing it is a valid answer and one I use more often than I would like to admit.
The carry-over symbol is the most honest cell in my spreadsheet. It says, out loud, that I lied to myself last Friday about what I would get done. That honesty is exactly why the review works.
The 12-Week Reflection Heatmap
The heatmap is the last block on the sheet and it is my favorite one. It sits at the bottom, twelve columns wide, one per week, with three rows: reviews completed, priorities finished, and average daily habit rate. Each cell is color scaled from white to a deep green so at a glance I can see whether the last three months have been consistent or patchy.
The data comes from the same History tab that powers the carry-over. Every Friday when I mark the review complete, a small Apps Script appends a row with the date, the number of steps checked, the number of priorities finished from last week, and the average daily habit completion for the week. The heatmap is just twelve INDEX-MATCH lookups against that history.
The heatmap answers a different question than the weekly review does. The review is about the last seven days. The heatmap is about the last twelve weeks. Together they let me spot patterns like the three-week dip I always take in April around my quarterly planning, or the fact that my priority completion rate is 22 percent higher when I run the review on a Friday versus a Saturday. Neither of those was visible before I built the heatmap.
I do the review at 5pm on Friday, before dinner. Not Sunday, not Monday morning. Friday evening review means the week is actually over in your head, next week has not started leaking into your attention yet, and the weekend gets to be a weekend instead of a low-grade planning session. This one scheduling choice roughly doubled the value I got from doing reviews at all.
Wiring It Into Your Habit Tracker
The wins and misses rollup only fires if the sheet knows where to look. If you already use my Google Sheets habit tracker template, the wiring is a two-minute job. In the weekly review sheet, open Data > Data connectors and add the habit tracker as a linked source, or simpler, just IMPORTRANGE it in and rename the imported tab to HabitLog. The QUERY formulas already reference that tab name.
The Apps Script that appends the History row on completion ships with the template under Extensions > Apps Script. It runs on a button click, not on a schedule, so nothing happens until you press mark review complete. That is deliberate, I do not want the History tab to grow when I have not actually done the review. The button is already bound, you just need to authorize it the first time.
The Friday Ritual That Makes It Stick
The template is only half the system. The other half is the ritual around it. Mine is embarrassingly boring and that is why it works. Every Friday at 5pm my calendar has a 30-minute block called Weekly Review. I close Slack, close WhatsApp Web, put my phone on the other side of the room, open the sheet, and start at step one.
The order I go in is always the same. Read the wins and misses first, because it grounds me in reality. Walk the 11 GTD steps in order, checking each one off as I finish it. Review last week's priorities and mark the done checkboxes honestly. Write next week's three priorities, letting the carry-overs auto-fill first. Glance at the 12-week heatmap and ask one question, is this trending or slipping. Press the mark review complete button. Close the sheet.
The whole ritual takes 22 to 28 minutes for me now, down from 45 when I first started. The sheet is the reason it got faster. Every field that used to be a blank cell is now either prefilled, auto-pulled, or a one-tap checkbox. The only real writing I do is the three priorities, which is exactly the writing that should be slow and deliberate.
If you are just starting, do not try to do a perfect review in week one. Copy the template, walk the eleven steps even if half of them do not apply yet, write three priorities even if they are half-formed, and press the button. The heatmap needs data before it can motivate you, and the carry-over logic needs a previous week before it can carry anything over. Week two is when the sheet starts working for you, and week four is when you will start looking forward to Friday.
A weekly review sheet you actually run for twelve weeks in a row beats a beautifully designed one you run for three. Boring and consistent wins the entire game.
Once the review is humming, the natural next step is to make sure the daily inputs feeding it are equally frictionless. That is where Mursa's habit tracker with streaks and the WhatsApp task capture flow do their work, so that by the time Friday rolls around, the wins and misses column has real signal in it and not just gaps. The weekly review alone has done more for my consistency than any monthly or quarterly system I have tried, so start there, get twelve weeks in a row, then decide if you want more.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best weekly review Google Sheets template?
The best weekly review Google Sheets template runs the full 11-step GTD checklist as checkboxes, pulls last week's wins and misses from a linked habit or task log, holds three priorities for next week with automatic carry-over from unfinished ones, and shows a 12-week reflection heatmap for consistency. That combination beats a plain checklist because the sheet does the remembering and you only do the deciding.
How do I set up a GTD weekly review in Google Sheets?
List the eleven canonical GTD steps in column B, add a checkbox in column C for each, and put a formula in row 1 like =COUNTIF(C2:C12,TRUE)&" of 11 done" as your progress badge. The rule that makes it stick is that the review only counts when the badge reads 11 of 11. The template above ships with this exact setup.
How does the carry-over logic for priorities work?
Every completed review appends a row to a History tab with the week's date, the three priorities, and their done checkboxes. On the next Friday, an IFERROR + INDEX + MATCH formula in the priority cells looks up last week's row, finds any priority whose done box was unchecked, and prefills it into this week's priority block with a carry symbol. Anything that was checked disappears and leaves the slot empty.
Can I use this template without a habit tracker?
Yes. If you do not connect a habit or task source, the wins and misses columns become plain text cells where you type them yourself. It takes a few extra minutes per week. Connecting the linked habit tracker template takes those minutes down to zero because a QUERY formula pulls the days above and below your threshold automatically.
When is the best time to run a weekly review?
Friday evening, before dinner, is the sweet spot for most people. The week is genuinely over in your head, next week has not started leaking into your attention, and the weekend stays a weekend. Saturday and Sunday reviews get pushed by weekend plans, and Monday morning reviews compete with the actual work you are trying to plan. Pick a fixed time, put it on the calendar, and treat it like a meeting with yourself.