jml's notebook

My weekly review

Published
2025-03-11

I’ve been using some version of Getting Things Done since around 2004. For better or worse, it’s a supporting pillar of my life.

One major part of this is the Weekly Review. The idea is that reality and systems diverge during the busyness of the week, and so it is essential to have dedicated time to get them back in sync, so the systems can be trusted.

The broad outline is:

  1. Collect all the disparate inputs in your life into one place
  2. Go through them one at a time and put them into the system
  3. Go through the system one thing at a time and make sure everything is still relevant and accurate
  4. Reflect

I’m being deliberately vague about “the system”, because I don’t want to rehash the entirety of GTD, I don’t want to be prescriptive, and because I think the weekly review generalises over a variety of systems. For me, my systems are a TODO list powered by OmniFocus, a calendar, and a text file in org format.

As of today, I have a personal weekly review and a completely separate one I do for work. This post is about my personal weekly review. Here’s its checklist:

Stay organized (weekly review)

As you can see, it’s a lot. It normally takes me about 60-90 minutes to get through it, but I hardly ever do it in one sitting.

The bulk of it is going through all of the sources of “stuff” that exist in my life. This means open browser tabs, scraps of paper, files on my desktop, and that sort of thing.

Over time, I’ve had to add items for Apple Notes (where I sometimes write things down as it’s the only thing to hand), and WhatsApp (because people send messages that require action when I’m not at all interested in doing them), and our nanny’s spreadsheet (because we couldn’t get calendar sharing to work for her).

I generally find the calendar review the most draining part, because there’s a lot there, and it’s easy to get distracted. It’s super useful though, as it helps me make sure I’ve booked leave, filled in appointments, etc.

For email, “emptying the inbox” means archiving mail I don’t care about, and adding items to OmniFocus for things that I need to follow up, as well as tagging them. It generally does not mean actually doing the work, unless it is quick. Often I use my weekly review time to write those quick emails that I don’t want to write, because it involves awkward human interaction. I’m gradually getting better at this.

Once everything is in the OmniFocus inbox, I go through each item one at a time and make sure it’s phrased as a clearly executable action, and that it’s in a project and tagged, so I can find it later. OmniFocus has great affordances for this, and gives you a subtle but satisfying nod when its inbox is emptied.

“Do OmniFocus Review” means use OmniFocus’s feature for reviewing each project one at a time. In GTD parlance, project is a completable thing with multiple actions, like “Remortgage the house”. In OmniFocus parlance, a project can be that, but it can also be any group of actions, so for me, my review goes through each completable project and also each ongoing responsibility (like “Run the household”, “Be a good friend”, or “Take care of myself physically”). Different projects have different review cadences. When I review a project, first of all I decide whether I even still want to do this, and then I look through the actions and check if they are up-to-date, or if anything is missing. If the project has no clear next actions, then it is considered stalled, and I try to come up with something to move it forward. If there are actions that don’t seem relevant any more, or that I know I’ll never bring myself to ever do, I remove them, or mark them as “Someday/Maybe” (Vale, “learn latin”, vale)

Then I review my “Waiting For” lists. This feels like a bit of a superpower, because it means I can follow up on what people have promised me, or that I can notice that someone has fulfilled a promise which then triggers the next step in whatever it is I am setting out to do. Often, I send a quick message or email there & then, which the recipient immediately acts on. I find this bit particularly satisfying.

Where I end up

Once the administrative sections are done, I’m in a state where I can trust that my calendar has all of my appointments and none of my non-appointments, that I know what I need to do ahead of any deadlines or appointments, that there’s nothing lurking in a conversation or email or piece of paper that’s going to bite me later, and that my TODO list has all the things I need to do on it. That is, I’ve brought the Galahad principle to bear on my organization system, so I can relax and trust it.

The snippet

The part of my review that I enjoy the most is writing my “weekly snippet”. This is a practice I picked up at Google and have found very useful in all sorts of contexts since then

For this, I look at a list of completed tasks and projects in OmniFocus that ignores any repeated tasks like “Prepare school lunch for kids”. I call this my “Accomplished” perspective, since it gives me an indication of things I’ve actually accomplished. I jot these tasks down in an “Achievements” subheading in an org-mode file in Emacs which has a heading for each week, putting the tasks into a more human context. Here’s a sample:

I don’t do this every week, because sometimes I don’t want to and because I’m gradually learning that adhering to rigid, self-imposed rules isn’t doing me any favours in either outcomes or character. However, since the TODO list can be so overwhelming, and since I often feel unequal to the challenges of ordinary life, having a list of what I have actually done can be a comfort—and one based in reality!

In a professional context, listing out your achievements or accomplishments each week is super valuable for tracking how well you are doing your job, whether you are doing the things that you planned to do, and for making it easier to write up performance reviews and CVs. I would highly recommend.

My snippet also tends to talk about my feelings, books I’ve read or shows I’ve watched, people I’ve seen, relationship moods, vague thoughts about what I ought to be doing and why. This often stimulates creativity, further plans or ideas on what to do, repentance, or thankfulness, of which see more in the next section.

I used to have subheadings in my snippet: Achievements, Vs Plans, Plans, and Surprises. Nowadays I don’t bother, and just go with freeform text, with bullet points as I see fit.

The spiritual stuff

I don’t want to preach at you, but I also don’t want to hide that this is framed in the context of my faith in Christ, which is deeply important to me. Feel free to skip this (or any!) section.

I try to ground this exercise following the principles of the Lord’s prayer, reminding myself of what really matters, and of God’s provision and sovereignty.

Having finished the review and especially the snippet, I often have a bit more perspective on what happened in the last week and what I intend to do in the week ahead. This gives me a natural opportunity to thank God, repent of sins, and ask his help, as thinking about the week as a whole often surfaces things that are less clear in the day-to-day.

I don’t want to paint a picture of my own saintliness. Some weeks this ends up being cursory or perfunctory, and some weeks I actively avoid God, like Adam in the garden. But this is the direction I want to travel in.

I don’t want to be normative about anything in this piece, but if you do a weekly review, I’d recommend starting by reflecting on what really matters, or at the least taking a few minutes away from the whirlwind of usual activity to get some perspective. If you have or want to have a gratitude practice, I bet you will find more and richer things to be thankful for if you do so in the context of a week.

Areas for improvement

The whole thing takes too long given how busy I am in my life, but if I don’t do it, I really do feel less productive and less confident in the following week. It also feels hard to justify when things are busy around the house. I only get a small amount of discretionary time in front of a computer on the weekends, and after an hour at it, it feels almost embarrassing to say that all I did was get my TODO list a bit more organized.

I currently use OmniFocus itself to remind me of each of the steps. If I don’t do the review by the end of the week (during a window that goes from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening), then the tasks of the review itself become overdue, get marked red, and show up as a numbered badge on my OmniFocus app. I don’t think this is good, because then I lose signal on actually time-sensitive tasks, and spend much of the week feeling berated by own TODO list.

When reviewing the weeks ahead in the calendar, I often get distracted or go down rabbit holes. Sometimes they are useful, but I’d rather my weekly review was a breadth-first traversal.

Our kitchen in-tray is a mess, and that’s partly because I don’t really know how to bring these principles to bear in a shared environment.

Doing all of the administrative parts of this review leaves my mind feeling fragmented, as if I have done many things but cannot say what. Writing the snippet often helps recover this by bringing a sense of narrative and accomplishment, but I wish I could avoid it in the first place. Or rather, the feeling makes me think that there’s something fundamental I could be doing differently.

In the past, I’ve had one review for both personal and professional life. I prefer this, as it’s all just me, and this is a thing I’m doing for me that benefits all those to whom I have a responsibility. However, good infosec means not storing employer’s data on personal devices, and not giving employer’s access to details about my personal life. Yet another example of how a lack of trust imposes costs, even when that lack of trust is prudent and practical.

So what?

I wrote this because someone asked me to and I thought it would be fun. I don’t have an agenda to persuade anyone to do anything like this.

However, as a matter of general data consistency, if you have any sort of system you use to track your life, and your normal way of updating it is event-driven, and you want your system to be an accurate reflection of reality, then you need to have a regular poll of reality to make up for events that got dropped or for changes that didn’t generate events in the first place.

Put another way, things happen, and you aren’t always able to note them down in the moment, perhaps because you didn’t even know about them, so you need to check up.

If I was going to advocate for any practice here, it would be the weekly snippet, because it’s an easy source of insight, and because you can basically do it in any way you want.