Guides: routines, daily planning and remembering things
How to do a weekly review in 30 minutes (and actually keep doing it)
The weekly review is the habit that keeps every other planning system working. Without it, lists grow stale, reminders pile up and you stop trusting your own tools. With it, you start each week knowing what matters. The problem is that most weekly review templates are long and elaborate. This one takes thirty minutes and has five steps.
Fix the time and treat it as an appointment
Choose a slot you can keep: Sunday at 6pm or Friday at 4pm are common. Make it recurring, with a reminder. A review that happens "when I have time" never happens. Keep it short enough that you are not tempted to skip it.
Step 1: empty the inboxes (10 minutes)
Collect loose ends: notes on your phone, paper scraps, messages you starred, things in your head. Give each one a date, turn it into a fact to keep, or delete it. At the end, nothing should be waiting in an unknown state.
Step 2: look back (5 minutes)
Scan the last seven days. What got done, what slipped, what kept being snoozed? You are not grading yourself. You are looking for patterns: the reminder always skipped on Mondays, the habit that happens only when you set an alarm.
Step 3: look ahead (10 minutes)
Look at the next seven to fourteen days: appointments, deadlines, birthdays, trips. Prepare what needs preparing: buy the present, book the table, set the alarm for the early train. Most weekly stress comes from surprises you could have seen on Sunday.
Step 4: choose three priorities (5 minutes)
From everything you could do next week, choose three outcomes that would make it a good week. Give each one a day and a time. Three is enough; more becomes a list you will not read.
Keep a short written record
One or two sentences on how the week went is enough. Reading them a month later shows progress that is invisible day to day, and makes the next review faster.
When you miss a week
You will skip a review now and then. Do not try to catch up on two weeks at once; just do the next one normally, maybe ten minutes longer. The habit is more valuable than any single review. If you skip three weeks in a row, the time slot is wrong: move it to a moment when you are usually at home and not exhausted, such as Saturday morning.
Try it: what you write, what LifeOS does
- “every sunday at 6pm weekly review” → A weekly reminder on Sundays at 18:00, one entry that repeats on its own.
- “monday at 10am finish the budget” → One of the week's priorities, placed in Monday's plan at 10:00.
- “today I finished the report” → Saved as a journal entry you can reread later.
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