A Weekly Review You’ll Actually Keep Doing (5 Questions, 10 Minutes)
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Most weekly review templates were clearly written by people who enjoy reviews. Thirty prompts, four dashboards, a values-realignment exercise — by week three you’re reviewing your failure to review.
A weekly review has exactly one job: make next week slightly smarter than last week. That takes five questions, not thirty.
The five questions
Set a ten-minute timer. Answer in one or two lines each. Bullet points are fine; honesty matters more than grammar.
1. What actually moved this week?
Not “what did I do” — what moved. Projects that advanced, conversations that unblocked something, the workout streak that survived. This question exists because your brain deletes wins by default and keeps only the misses. Write the wins down before they evaporate.
2. What did I avoid?
The gentlest and most useful question on the list. Somewhere in your week there’s a task you circled six times without touching. Name it — without the lecture. Avoidance is information: it usually means the task is either unclear, too big, or emotionally loaded. Which one is it?
3. Where did the time actually go?
One honest sentence. “Meetings ate Tuesday and Wednesday morning; evenings went to the couch.” No time-tracking app required — your rough impression is accurate enough to spot the pattern that matters.
4. What’s the one thing next week that makes everything else easier?
Steal this question wholesale. Scan the week ahead and find the domino: the decision, conversation, or task that, once done, shrinks three other tasks. That’s your first priority for Monday — decided on Sunday, when you’re calm, instead of Monday morning, when you’re not.
5. What am I dragging that I should drop?
Commitments rot quietly. The project that stopped mattering, the newsletter you skim out of guilt, the recurring meeting nobody remembers scheduling. Once a week, ask if anything on your plate belongs in the bin. Most weeks the answer is “nothing” — but the weeks it isn’t will save you months.
Making it stick (the part everyone skips)
Three rules, learned the hard way:
- Attach it to something that already happens. The review doesn’t get its own heroic time slot; it piggybacks on the last 10 minutes of your Sunday reset, or your Friday shutdown, or your Sunday-evening tea.
- Same page, every week. One running document, newest week on top. Scrolling past old entries is the long-term review — no extra system needed.
- Rotate one question monthly. After a month, answers go on autopilot. Swap question 3 or 5 for something you’re curious about (“What gave me energy?” / “What did I say yes to that I regret?”). Fresh question, fresh signal.
Where to keep it
Wherever you’ll actually look: a paper notebook works, a plain note works, and a simple Notion page with five toggle headings works nicely if you like everything in one place. The tool is the least important decision on this page — the calendar block is the system.
Part of SortedWeek’s weekly planning series. New guides added every week.