A ten-minute weekly review for people who hate weekly reviews

Every productivity system has a weekly review, and almost everybody stops doing it. The canonical version from David Allen’s Getting Things Done is thorough: collect loose papers, process inboxes, review projects, review calendars, review someday lists. Done properly it takes an hour or more, and an hour on a Friday afternoon is exactly the hour you do not have.

The point of a weekly review is narrower than the ritual suggests. It exists so that you can trust your list. If you trust it, you stop carrying things in your head. If you do not, you stop looking at it. Ten minutes is enough to keep that trust, as long as you do the right ten minutes.

Minute 0-2: empty the inbox

Everything you captured this week that has not been dealt with. For each item, decide one thing:

• Do it if it takes under two minutes.
• Date it if it needs doing at a specific time.
• List it if it is a real task without a date.
• Delete it if it no longer matters.

Do not organise, tag or reword beyond what is needed to understand it later.

Minute 2-5: look at last week

Scroll through what was due last week. Anything not done gets one of three outcomes: a new date, a “this is not happening” deletion, or a note that it is blocked on someone. Overdue items that keep getting pushed are the main reason people stop trusting their lists. Be honest; moving something for the fourth time is a decision not to do it.

Minute 5-8: look at next week

Open your calendar for the coming week. For each meeting, ask: does anything need preparing? For each deadline, is there a task with a date before it? This is where most of the value is: it is cheaper to discover on Friday that the report is due Tuesday than on Monday night.

Minute 8-10: pick three

Choose the three things that would make next week a good week if they got done. Write them where you will see them on Monday morning. Not ten. Three.

What to leave out

• Reviewing every project. Do that monthly.
• Re-tagging and reorganising. It feels productive and changes nothing.
• Someday lists. Look at them when you are bored, not on a timer.

Make it easier to start

Most weekly reviews fail at the starting line, not halfway through. Three things help:

1. Fix a time. Friday 16:30 or Monday 08:30. Put it in the calendar.
2. Make the inbox small. If you process captures daily, the weekly inbox step is two minutes, not twenty.
3. Use a screen that shows what matters. Jot’s Today screen shows what is overdue, what is due and what was captured, which is most of the first two steps in one view. Jot also has an optional daily review that summarises open todos at a time you choose.

Why ten minutes is enough

The research on implementation intentions - the work associated with Peter Gollwitzer on “if-then” planning - suggests that deciding when and where you will act makes follow-through more likely. A weekly review is, at its core, that: deciding next week’s when and where before it starts. You do not need an hour to make those decisions. You need to look at the right three lists and choose.

If the ten-minute version sticks for a month, extend it. If the hour-long version never stuck at all, this one is better than the one you are not doing. See search that covers yesterday for finding the thing you remember capturing but cannot see.

Jot is on the Microsoft Store if your inbox is currently “various places”.

Jot is a quick-capture app for Windows: one hotkey, one line, back to what you were doing. What it is, or what is still unproven.