How to run a weekly review

Planning without reviewing is rewriting the same optimistic week over and over. The review is the part that makes month two better than month one, and it takes about fifteen minutes.

Four questions

What actually got done? Not what you intended. Look at last week’s sheet and mark what happened. Be specific: half-finished counts as half, and saying so is more useful than a tick or a blank.

What did not, and does it still matter? This is the important one. Most of what does not get done in a week turns out not to need doing, and carrying it forward automatically is how a to-do list quietly becomes an archive of decisions you have avoided making. Cross things off because you have decided against them, not only because you have finished them.

What went better than expected? People skip this and it is the one that keeps the habit alive. Noticing three things that worked is the difference between a review that feels like an audit and one that feels worth doing. Full Focus builds its weekly preview around exactly this, listing three to five wins before anything else, on the grounds that measuring against where you started rather than where you hoped to be is what makes the exercise sustainable.

What would you change? One thing. Not a system overhaul.

Partial credit

Marking a priority as 75% done is more useful than a blank box. It tells you next week whether to finish it or drop it, and it stops the review being a binary record of failure.

The Full Focus weekly preview does this explicitly: last week’s three priorities each get a percentage rather than a tick. It is a small thing that changes how the review feels, because most weeks contain a lot of genuine progress on things that did not finish.

Fifteen minutes, not an hour

A review that takes an hour is a review you will do three times.

Fifteen minutes is enough for four questions and a look at the calendar. If yours is running long, it is probably because you are planning inside the review. Separate them: review first, then plan, and let the review be short.

Pair it with planning

The review and the plan belong in the same session, in that order. Reviewing after planning is nearly useless, because you have already committed to next week before you looked at what happened in this one.

The order is: what happened, what still matters, what would you change, then plan the week ahead. Twenty minutes for the pair, once a week.

Keep the questions on the page

Write the four questions on the sheet, or use a layout that already has a review block. A review you have to remember the shape of is a review you will do differently every week and eventually stop doing.

This is one of the clearest differences between paid and free planners. A retrospective block is near-universal in paid planners and near-absent in free ones, which is odd given it is one line of printing and it is the part that compounds.

What not to review weekly

Goals. Values. Whether the whole system is working. Those are monthly or quarterly questions and putting them in a weekly review makes it heavy enough to skip.

The weekly review is about the week. Keep it there.

Doing it when the week was bad

The temptation after a bad week is to skip the review, which is exactly backwards: a week where nothing went to plan contains more information than one that went smoothly.

Keep the same four questions. Add nothing. The answer to “what would you change” after a genuinely bad week is often about capacity rather than method, and that is worth knowing before you plan the next one at the same volume.

Reviewing without a previous plan

If you did not plan the week, you can still review it. Write down what actually happened, roughly, then ask the same questions.

Two or three weeks of that is often enough to show where the time is going, which is usually the thing people want a planner to tell them in the first place.

What to keep

Most weekly sheets can be thrown away. Keep the ones where something changed: a week where a new routine started, or one you would want to look back at.

If you are keeping them all, you are archiving rather than reviewing, and an archive nobody reads costs storage and attention for nothing.

Monthly and quarterly

The weekly review answers questions about the week. Larger questions, whether the goals are still the right goals, whether the system is working at all, belong to a longer cadence.

Once a month is enough for the first. Once a quarter is enough for the second. Putting either into a weekly review makes it heavy enough to skip, and a skipped weekly review is a much bigger loss than a delayed quarterly one.

Reviewing with someone else

If you work with a manager, a coach or a study partner, the four questions work unchanged as a shared agenda. The value is mostly in the second one: deciding out loud that something is not going to happen is considerably easier than deciding it privately.