How to do a
weekly review.
The 30-minute version.

Most people who hear "do a weekly review" picture an hour of sitting at a desk on Sunday with multiple notebooks open, gradually losing the will to live. This is what kills the practice before it begins. The weekly review is not an hour. It is thirty minutes. If yours is taking longer than that, you are doing the wrong things, or you are doing the right things in the wrong order. Either way, this is fixable.

This post is the working version. The one I run on a Sunday evening, on a kitchen table or in a quiet coffee shop, with one notebook and a pen. Five sections, six minutes each, thirty minutes total. By the end of it, the week ahead has a shape, the last week has a verdict, and the Monday morning before-coffee question — what am I doing today? — has an answer that was decided yesterday, by someone with more bandwidth than I will have at 7am.

Why the weekly review is the most undervalued planning move

Daily planning is the visible part of productivity. It's what people picture when they hear the word "planner." Annual goals are the impressive part — the bit you can tell other people about at dinner. But the load-bearing layer between them, the layer that actually decides whether the year holds together or not, is the weekly review.

The reason is mechanical. A day is too short to course-correct. By the time you've noticed that today is going off, the day is mostly over. A year is too long. By the time you notice in December that the annual goal isn't going to happen, it is December, and you are about to start writing next year's annual goals while still failing this year's. A week is the right unit. Short enough that you can actually change course; long enough that the change has time to show up.

David Allen's Getting Things Done calls the weekly review "the master key" to the whole system, and he is correct, but his version takes an hour and a half if you do it as written. Cal Newport recommends planning the week ahead but is less specific about how. The Stoics had the evening examination — Seneca's nightly self-review — but no equivalent for the unit of a week. Nobody, as far as I have read, has written down the thirty-minute version specifically. So here it is.

The five sections, in order

The order matters. If you do these out of sequence, you will spend longer thinking about the same things and reach worse conclusions. The sequence below is the one that has held over four years of weekly use, with one revision a year ago that cut the duration from forty-five minutes to thirty.

Section one · The brain dump (six minutes)

You sit down with the notebook and a pen. You set a timer for six minutes. Then you write down, in any order, every single thing currently in your head that has a thread attached to it. Tasks. Worries. Half-thoughts. Things you mean to do for someone. Emails you have been putting off. Birthday cards you should buy. The conversation with your line manager that has been sitting unscheduled. The article you keep meaning to read. The minor financial admin that has been waiting a fortnight. Everything.

This is the part most people skip. They think of the weekly review as the planning bit, so they go straight to the planning. But you cannot plan well from a brain that is still holding twenty open threads. The brain dump is the act of putting the threads on a page so that the rest of the review can be done with a cleaner head. The Brain Dump Page is built for exactly this six minutes — it provides a structured catchment area so you don't have to think about how to write the list while you're writing the list.

Write quickly. Don't sort. Don't organise. Don't worry about whether something is "important enough" to include. The six minutes is for emptying, not for triaging. The triage happens in the next section.

Section two · The processing (six minutes)

Now go through everything you wrote in section one. Each item gets sorted into exactly one of four buckets. Do not invent a fifth bucket. The fifth bucket is where ideas go to rot. This four-bucket sort comes directly from GTD, and David Allen is right about it.

• Action — something that needs doing this week. Assign it a day. Write the day next to it. Move on.
• Project — something that needs doing but has multiple steps. Write down what the next single action is, and treat that as an Action.
• Reference — information you'll need later but is not actionable. File it where it lives (note, folder, email label) and cross it off the dump.
• Trash — the things that, when you look at them honestly, are not going to happen. Cross them off without ceremony. Most things end up here. This is the single most freeing part of the whole review.

By the end of section two, every item is either gone or has a day next to it. Your head is now quieter than it has been all week. You have not done any planning yet. You have just emptied the buffer.

Section three · The debrief (six minutes)

Now turn to the page that recorded last week's intentions. (You set these last Sunday. If this is your first weekly review, skip this section and gain six minutes back.) Look at what you intended to deliver last week. Ask three questions. Write the answers down.

• What hit? Of the three weekly intentions I set last week, which ones got delivered? Be honest. "Mostly delivered" is not delivered. "Made progress" is not delivered. The intention was a binary outcome; either it happened or it didn't.
• What missed? Of the ones that didn't get delivered, what stopped them? Be specific. Don't write "got busy" — write which meeting overran or which family obligation landed unexpectedly or which task you avoided because you didn't actually want to do it.
• What's the pattern? Look at the last four weekly reviews. Is the same kind of intention missing every week? Is the same kind of distraction recurring? If the same thing has missed three weeks in a row, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a structural problem with the way you are setting the intentions or with the way the week is shaped.

The debrief is uncomfortable. That is what makes it useful. It is the only part of the week where you tell yourself the truth about your own delivery. The Coaching series Weekly Debrief uses a Motivational Interviewing structure for this section, which makes the honesty land more cleanly than a plain three-question list. But the plain three-question list works too.

Section four · The cascade (six minutes)

Now you look at the 90-day plan. (If you don't have one, this is the strongest argument for setting one up. A later post in this series covers how.) The 90-day plan has three goals on it, each with a numeric metric. Your job in section four is to ask: given these three goals, what does this specific week need to deliver?

You don't pick weekly intentions from the air. You pick them from the 90-day plan. This is the cascade in action — every week serves the quarter, every quarter serves the year, every year serves the values document above it. The reason your week feels arbitrary is that you are picking weekly tasks from the brain dump (which is just everything that happened to be in your head). The reason another person's week feels intentional is that they are picking weekly tasks from a list of three named outcomes for the quarter.

Write three weekly intentions. Three. Not five. Each one points back at a 90-day goal. Each one is small enough to deliver in five working days. Each one has a measurable definition of done. By the end of section four you have a page that says, in effect: this week, I am going to deliver A, B, and C. A serves the launch goal. B serves the strength goal. C serves the family goal.

Section five · The week ahead (six minutes)

Last section. Now you have the three intentions, you sketch the week. Not in detail — just structurally. Which day is which intention's main day? Where are the deep work blocks? Which meetings are immovable, and which can you push? Is there a Friday-afternoon hole that you should fill with something useful before someone else fills it for you?

This is not the daily plan. The daily plan happens each evening for the next morning. This is the shape that the daily plans will inherit from. By the end of section five, your week ahead has:

• Three named intentions, each tied to a 90-day goal
• A rough idea of which day each intention will get its main work
• The deep work blocks placed where they need to be, before they get overwritten by something else
• A list of small administrative tasks that need to land somewhere this week, sorted by day

You close the notebook. The review is done. The kettle is still warm.

What makes the thirty-minute version work

Three things, in order of importance.

The first is the timer. Each section is six minutes. You set the timer, you do that section, the timer goes off, you move to the next section. You will not finish section one. You don't need to. You need to finish the section as well as you can in six minutes, and then stop. The constraint is what makes the review possible at all — without it, section one expands to fill the time and sections four and five never happen. With it, every section gets enough attention to be useful and the whole thing fits in thirty minutes.

The second is the sequence. Brain dump first, processing second, debrief third, cascade fourth, week ahead fifth. If you start with the week ahead, your head is too full to think clearly. If you start with the cascade, you haven't yet remembered all the things that need to go on the list. The order extracts everything from your head, sorts it, learns from last week, connects to the quarter, and only then projects forward. Each section depends on the one before it.

The third is doing it at the same time every week. Mine is Sunday at 7pm. Some people prefer Friday afternoon — closing the week as it ends. Some prefer Monday morning — opening it as it begins. The day doesn't matter; the consistency does. The review you do at the same time every week becomes a ritual. The review you do "when I have time this weekend" becomes a thing you skip.

The single hardest part to keep going

The honest answer is: the third week. You will do the first weekly review with enthusiasm. The second will be slightly less novel but still feel good. The third will land on a Sunday when you are tired, or when the football is on, or when one of the children is poorly, and you will not want to do it. That is the week the practice is decided.

If you skip the third week, the practice is over. You will tell yourself you will do it next week, but you will not, because the resistance only compounds. If you do it on the third week, even badly, even in fifteen minutes instead of thirty, the practice survives. Then it survives the fourth week. By the eighth week it is what you do on a Sunday evening without thinking. By the twelfth week, the idea of not doing it feels uncomfortable.

The smartest thing you can do to protect the third week is to set the time before you need it. Sunday at 7pm. Put it in the calendar with a reminder. Tell your partner. Make the appointment with yourself the way you would make any other appointment. Then keep it.

What to do if you've never done one before

If this is the first time, do it now. Open a notebook. Set a timer. Do section one for six minutes — write down everything currently in your head. You will be surprised how much there is. Most people, asked to do this for the first time, fill two pages.

Then sort it, badly, into the four buckets in section two. Skip section three (no last week to debrief). Do section four with whatever proxy for a 90-day plan you have — even "the three most important things in my life right now" works. Sketch the week ahead in section five.

You will have spent twenty minutes. The week ahead will look different from any week you have planned before. It will feel different on Monday morning. You will not believe how much of an effect it has on a Tuesday afternoon. Then next Sunday, do it again.

The free 7-Day Focus Sprint includes a Weekly Review sheet and a Brain Dump Page — enough to run this exact practice for a week, no payment required, no upsell wall. If after a week the methodology fits, the complete Groundwork bundle is £54.99 for the full set of 28 tools across every format. If it doesn't fit, you've still done a useful thing on a Sunday evening. That is a successful Groundwork experience either way.

Thirty minutes. Five sections. One Sunday. The single most underrated planning move available to a working adult. Now you have a working version.