Weekly review for your journal: a 15-minute routine for looking back

A weekly review is one fixed sitting, once a week, where you reread what you wrote and pull out what it adds up to. For a journal that means reading the week's entries in order, marking what came up more than once, noticing what you planned and then stopped mentioning, and ending with one question to carry into next week. Fifteen minutes is enough for a week of short entries.

Where does the term "weekly review" come from?

Most of what you'll find under "weekly review" comes from productivity, and mostly from David Allen's Getting Things Done method (GTD). There, the Weekly Review is a checklist of 11 steps in three groups: get clear, get current and get creative. You empty your inbox and your head, go over your calendar and your lists, and check that every project has a next action (Getting Things Done).

The official GTD site says Allen recommends doing it every 7 to 10 days, suggests 1 to 2 hours for a thorough one, and quotes him calling it the "critical success factor" of the whole method (Getting Things Done).

A journal review keeps the rhythm and drops the checklist. GTD reviews a system of tasks so nothing falls through. A journal review reads a week of your own words to see what they say about you. There's nothing to process and no inbox to empty. You're only reading.

How is it different from just journaling more?

A weekly review adds no new writing to speak of. It's the reading half of journaling, the half most people never get to. Reflective journaling covers why looking back after a few days shows you more than writing about the day while you're still in it. This lesson covers the sitting itself.

Keep one rule. During the week you capture. On review day you read. Don't try to do both at once, or the review turns into another entry about how the week felt on Sunday.

A 15-minute weekly review routine

Pick a time that already exists in your week, like Sunday after breakfast or the first coffee on Monday, and keep it fixed. Then:

1. Set a timer for 15 minutes. A limit keeps it from feeling like homework, and a week of short entries doesn't need more.
2. Reread the whole week once, in order, without writing. About five minutes. Read it the way you'd read someone else's notes.
3. Mark what repeated. On the second pass, underline any person, task, word or feeling that showed up on two or more days. Write each one in a margin with the days next to it: "the deck: Mon, Wed, Fri".
4. Mark what disappeared. Find one thing you said you'd do or deal with early in the week that never came up again.
5. Check what changed. Compare with last week's review. Did last week's question get an answer, or did the same thread run another week?
6. Write one question for next week, in your own words. Build it from what you marked. "Why was I tired on Saturday, after the deck was done?" beats "How can I rest more?" because only your week could have produced it.

Keep the question somewhere you'll see it, and start next week's review by reading it.

What to look for in a weekly review

Three things carry most of the value. If you only have time for one, take the first.

Repeats. Anything that showed up on two or more days. A name, a task, a word like "fine" or "tired". One mention is an event. Three mentions in a week is a theme, and a theme you didn't plan to write about is the most useful thing a review can find.

What you avoided. The thing you meant to handle on Monday and then never wrote about again. Silence in a journal is easy to miss because there's nothing on the page to catch your eye. Ask yourself: what did I expect to be writing about this week that I wasn't?

What changed. Did a repeat from last week fade, grow or turn into something else? A thread that runs three weeks in a row is worth more of your attention than any single bad day.

Leave out the scorecard: no grading the week, no counting the days you journaled. You want the one or two threads that run through it.

Why do most people skip the weekly review?

Doing it every week is the hard part. Even the GTD site, about its own much bigger review, calls it "one of the steps people tend to resist the most."

For a journal there are two reasons. The first is boredom. Rereading your own notes is dull, especially the flat days, and by Sunday the Monday entry feels like old news. The second is harder. You were there for every day you're rereading, so the pattern is hard to see from inside it. You read "tired" on Saturday and remember why you were tired, and the memory explains the word away before you notice it's the third time.

If fifteen minutes won't happen, do a smaller one. The GTD advice applies here too: "Any Review is better than no Review." Five minutes, and only step 6. Skim the week and write one question. The question carries most of the value.

How Notka does the rereading for you

Notka is a voice journal that writes back. During the week you talk for a minute or five, into the recorder on the web or with a one-press Shortcut on your iPhone, or type when that's easier. The next morning, a short letter replies to the day.

On Sunday, a weekly letter does the review. It rereads the whole week, quotes what you said with the dates you said it, points at what repeated, and ends with one question. It doesn't grade the week or tell you what to do. Answering stays yours. See the letters.

Here is what a weekly letter looks like.