What a weekly review is for
Lists go stale. A task written on Monday is half true by Thursday, a project with no next action quietly stops, and a promise made in a hallway is gone by the weekend. A weekly review is the block of time where you put the system back in line with reality, before small drift becomes a missed deadline.
David Allen's Getting Things Done made the habit popular and named its three parts: get clear (empty the inboxes and your head), get current (walk the calendar, projects and waiting-for lists) and get creative (decide what comes next). The template above keeps that order and adds two sections most checklists skip: an honest look back with reasons, and a "so what" step.
How long each part takes
Most weekly review guides say "about 30 minutes" and stop there. Here is where the time actually goes once the habit is running:
- Get clear, 10 minutes. Inboxes to zero means every item is either done, deleted, or turned into a task. The brain dump is the part people skip and the part that matters most: anything still in your head is not in the system.
- Look back, 10 minutes. Write what got done and what slipped, each slip with a reason. One line each. This is a reflection, not a report.
- Get current, 10 minutes. Last week's calendar for follow-ups you owe, the next two weeks for anything that needs preparation, and every active project checked for a next action. Waiting-for items get a date and a decision: nudge or wait.
- So what, 5 minutes. One thing to stop, keep and change.
- Next week, 10 minutes. Three priorities with dates, plus a line for what you are deliberately not doing.
The first review takes longer, often 90 minutes, because everything has piled up. By the fourth week the inboxes are smaller and the review settles under 45 minutes.
Turning observations into next week
This is the gap in most weekly review templates: they collect observations and then ask you to "adjust". Adjust what, exactly?
Use the so what step as a filter. Read the Slipped and Energy lines and ask which single change would have prevented the worst of it. Then make that change small enough to happen next week: not "study more", but "study blocks on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday only", as the nursing student example shows. One change per week, checked in the next review, compounds faster than five resolutions.
Then pick the top three. If something on the list has been in the top three for three weeks without moving, it is not a priority; it is a project that needs a smaller next action, or a decision to drop it.
Monthly and quarterly reviews
A monthly review template is the weekly one with two additions: a Numbers line (whatever you track, from revenue to runs) and a short check against the month's goals. Read the four weekly reviews before you start. The useful part of a monthly review is the pattern across them: the same slip, the same drained evening.
A quarterly review template adds one more thing: score every goal as hit, missed or dropped, and stop one project. The bakery example above stops a market stall that earned $310 for six hours of the owner's time. Quarterly is the right altitude for that decision; weekly is too close, yearly is too late.
Common mistakes
- Reviewing only tasks. The calendar and the waiting-for list hide most of the dropped promises.
- No reasons on slips. Without a because, the review repeats the same week.
- Ten priorities. Three is a choice. Ten is a list.
- Skipping the review in a good week. Calm weeks are when long-term goals drift, as the fourth example shows.
- Starting fresh every week. Open last week's review first and check its top three. A review that never looks at the previous one is a diary, not a system.
When to use a different template
If you only want to lay out next week's days and hours, the weekly planner template is the tool; run this review first and feed it the top three. If the week is chaos and you cannot see straight, start with the brain dump template and come back. For goals that span a quarter or more, write them in the goal setting template so the weekly review has something to measure against.
A weekly review that remembers last week
Save this template in Scribelet, see every open task from the week in one Tasks view, and ask your notes what has slipped three weeks running. Encrypted, free to start.
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