Weekly Review

Last updated on August 6, 2021

This note is part of the series of notes about My Workflows.

High Level

I conduct a weekly review every Sunday night before I go to bed. The review takes anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes. I picked Sunday night because I usually don’t have anything else going on, and then I can hit the ground running with my Monday morning writing group.

I focused first on building the habit of the weekly review by starting with only a few items (like emptying my personal inbox and reviewing my tasks). As I’ve gotten more comfortable doing the review I’ve added items to it. The weekly review has become a place where I schedule recurring tasks; I find that many recurring tasks are best scheduled either weekly or daily. I also sometimes skip items if I’m particularly tired or feeling a lot of resistance, but I do most items every week. If I really don’t feel like doing something I explicitly mark it as optional or just remove it from my list.

Current Implementation

Tasks

Here’s the current list of tasks I complete for the weekly review:

• Process personal e-mail inbox
• Process work e-mail inbox (optional)
• Process Obsidian inbox ¹
• Process and tag all of my Raindrop links
• Process items with the #[[Quick Capture]] tag in Roam Research
• Clean out my computer Desktop and Downloads folders ²
• Review and update my budget on You Need A Budget
• Process Readwise items imported into Roam Research (optional)
• Review and update my goals on Beeminder
• Reflect on the previous week:
  • Did I accomplish my top three priorities from last week? (Yes/No)
  • Complete Plus, Minus, Next exercise
• Plan for the upcoming week:
  • Check my Semester Plan and note important upcoming deadlines
  • Clean out iOS reminders and OmniFocus inbox
  • Complete project review on OmniFocus and choose items to focus on for the coming week
  • Choose my top three priorities for the upcoming week
  • Update daily plan Roam42 SmartBlock with top three priorities and upcoming deadlines ³
  • Assign tasks to specific days

Template

I have written out the tasks listed above as a set of to dos in Roam Research. I then copied and pasted the tasks into a Keyboard Maestro shortcut that I can trigger by typing rmwk.⁴ I nest each Weekly Review under the current date on the Weekly Review page so I can easily go back and look at past reviews. I also block reference the Plus, Minus, Next exercise prompts so I can see the responses to the prompts over time.

Potential Improvements

In an ideal world I think I would spend a bit more time on the reflection questions each week. However, I have historically had a lot of resistance to answering them, and the Plus, Minus, Next is short enough that I just do it. Some future way to evaluate the right balance might be nice, like more detailed monthly or semester reviews.

Resources

Tiago Forte has a lot of great writing about weekly reviews. Here’s one post to get started.

Notes

1. I talk in more detail about some of my processing/tagging workflow in Capture Workflow. ↩

2. This is incredibly helpful, as it forces me to either delete random screenshots and documents forever, or move them to a better location on my hard drive. I mostly follow the PARA Method for organizing my hard drive. ↩

3. I update the block references to the priorities and deadlines in my Roam Research graph (see Daily Review). ↩

4. Keyboard Maestro is not needed for this; templates or SmartBlocks work just as well. I just have had it set up this way since before templates were an option and I like not having to hit enter for it to trigger. ↩

Notes mentioning this note

Daily Reflection

This note is part of the series of notes about [[My Workflows]].

Daily Review

This note is part of the series of notes about [[My Workflows]].

My Workflows

This is the entry node to a set of notes on my workflows. The creation of these notes was inspired...

Semester Plan

This note is part of the series of notes about [[My Workflows]].