How to Write a Weekly Review: Four Questions, Ten Minutes

Daily records show you trees; the forest only appears at the weekly scale. Which weekday keeps collapsing, what kind of task keeps slipping, whether the week actually moved anything forward — none of that is visible from inside a single day.

A weekly review is ten minutes of looking at that forest. Not a status report — an exercise in salvaging one observation that makes next week slightly different.

When to write it

One fixed slot on the weekend works best — Sunday evening is the classic; Friday before logging off is just as good (you get to put work down and start the weekend clean). What matters more than the day is the position: right before you plan next week. When review and planning sit next to each other, observations flow into plans.

The 10-minute template: four questions

1. What did I actually finish this week? (2 min) Don’t answer from memory — open your records and count. Half of this question is acknowledging progress (you usually did more than you felt); the other half is preparing ingredients for the next question.

2. Where did plan and reality diverge most? (3 min) Compare what you intended with what happened and find the single widest gap. If something got pushed, what pushed it? If something took twice as long, what didn’t you know? This isn’t a blame box — it’s calibration, shrinking next week’s planning error.

3. What pattern showed up more than once? (3 min) Skim the daily records for anything that appeared twice or more. “Wednesday evenings collapse.” “No deep work on meeting days.” “Once I start I finish fast — starting is the problem.” Patterns are invisible in daily reviews and only exist at this scale — this question is why weekly reviews exist.

4. What’s one thing to change next week? (2 min) Pick one item from questions 2–3 and turn it into an action: “no evening commitments on Wednesdays.” Writing it in if-then form makes it stick. One is enough — one change a week is fifty a year.

The relationship with daily reviews

A weekly review becomes dramatically easier if you keep a daily review — the ingredients are already laid out, and you just skim for patterns. Without daily records you’re reconstructing a week from memory, and ten minutes becomes forty. If you’re starting from zero: build the three-line daily habit first, let two or three weeks accumulate, then add the weekly layer.

Common mistakes

• Writing a performance report. Listing everything you did makes it long, and long makes next week’s review not happen. Count the list; spend the effort on patterns.
• Choosing several changes. Pick three and all three fail. One.
• Back-filling skipped weeks. Missed last week? Drop it. This week only.

Where the records already live

The raw material of a weekly review is “what happened this week.” Writing it where your completed tasks and daily reviews already sit removes the entire cost of gathering.

That’s how the weekly review works in fecit, the app we’re building: the week’s completed tasks and daily reviews lay themselves out, with stats (completions, consistency) alongside — questions 1 and 3 come pre-plated.

This weekend, take ten minutes. Four questions: what finished, what diverged, what repeated, what one thing changes.