Close the week, plan the next

Daily notes capture; the weekly review digests. Without a weekly pass, open loops accumulate silently and next week starts as a reaction to whatever shouts loudest. Thirty minutes with this template turns a pile of days into a plan.

How the review runs

Skim the week's daily notes and project logs first — you are harvesting, not remembering. Record what went well (morale is data), what got completed (close the loops explicitly), and what is still open (each item either gets a next-week slot or is consciously dropped). Then write next week as a short checklist: three to five outcomes, not twenty tasks. The template's sections follow this order exactly.

Weekly cadence, not daily

This is deliberately not a bigger daily note. Daily notes answer "what happened today"; the review answers "what does it add up to and what changes." Keep one review note per week, tag it by week or month, and link it to the daily notes it summarizes. A month of reviews is a better progress record than any status report you will ever write.

Common failure modes

• Reviewing without reading the week first — the loudest memory wins, not the truest.
• Planning twenty items — the week holds three to five outcomes; the rest is a wish list.
• Skipping the drop decision — every open loop carried forward without a slot is clutter with a guilty conscience.

Open this template in Typehall

Open this template in Typehall — it creates a new Weekly review note with the wins, completions, open-loops, and next-week sections ready. Nothing is overwritten; your existing notes stay exactly as they are.

Open the notepad and run this week's review before Monday does it for you.