The Weekly Review: A 30-Minute Practice

A weekly review is a thirty-minute Friday practice that runs three blocks — Get Clear, Get Current, Get Creative — inside a single dated markdown file. The blocks are David Allen's,¹ the cap is Cal Newport's,² the file is yours. The full template is below; the rest of the post explains why each line earned its place.

The weekly review is the oldest still-working ritual in personal knowledge management. David Allen named the Weekly Review the "Master Key to GTD" — Tiago Forte quotes Allen's framing in his 2017 essay "The Weekly Review is an Operating System".³ Allen's Getting Things Done (Penguin, 2001; revised 2015) recommends "scheduling a weekly review, reflecting on the six different levels" of the Horizons of Focus.⁴ Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, first published in 1989, had sold "more than 20 million copies" by Covey's death in 2012;⁵ he built the entire Quadrant II discipline — Habit 3, Put First Things First — around weekly planning.⁶ Tiago Forte, who later codified the Building a Second Brain method, names "Weekly and Monthly Reviews" as one of the three habits "most important to your Second Brain."⁷ Forty years of practice converge on the same thirty minutes.

Why most weekly reviews fail

Most weekly reviews fail because they grow until they hurt. A review that takes three hours on Saturday gets skipped the next Saturday. The fix is the cap. Tiago Forte writes that a working weekly review gives "the ability to go from total chaos to total clarity in 15–30 minutes."³ Below that floor it is grooming; above the ceiling, procrastination.

The duration data backs the cap. Asian Efficiency tells beginners to "plan for about 60-90 minutes when you are first starting out. Once you have done it consistently for a few weeks, most people can get through the full process in 30-45 minutes."⁸ On the GTD forum, vaughan76 reports that "once I get into a groove they might only last 15-30 minutes,"⁹ while another forum user describes 6-hour reviews — the warning case the cap is meant to prevent. Leo Babauta puts it bluntly at Zen Habits: "if you are a busy person, it's key that you are able to get this critical component done in under an hour, or even 30 minutes if possible."¹⁰ Thirty minutes is the floor where the practice survives a busy quarter.

The template

The template below is a single markdown file, fits on one screen, uses standard CommonMark plus YAML frontmatter — no plugin, no proprietary syntax, no app required. Save it as templates/weekly.md. Every Friday, copy it to weekly/2026-W20.md (the ISO 8601 week number) and run the blocks in order: twelve minutes Get Clear, twelve Get Current, six Get Creative. The block names come from the David Allen Company's official Weekly Review checklist.¹¹

---
title: "Weekly — 2026-W20"
weekStart: 2026-05-11
weekEnd: 2026-05-17
nextWeek: 2026-W21
energy: 7/10
tags: [weekly]
---

# Weekly — 2026-W20

> One paragraph on the week.
> Shipped the v0.4 export and the daily-notes post. Slept poorly mid-week —
> protect the next one.

## Get Clear (12 min)

- [x] Email inbox to zero (or scheduled to a defer label)
- [x] Physical desk + paper inbox cleared
- [x] Browser tabs collected into a `read-later/` note, then closed
- [x] Notes inbox processed — every loose capture filed or deleted
- [x] Head emptied: dump every open loop into the *Capture* block below

### Capture (loose-loop dump)

- Renew passport — embassy hours TBD
- Reply to Priya re ADR-0015
- The search refactor — still avoiding it
- Idea: weekly note frontmatter could carry a numeric `energy` field

## Get Current (12 min)

### Calendar (-2 weeks / +4 weeks)

- Past two weeks: nothing left undone except Priya reply (carried).
- Next four weeks: Tuesday 5/26 — board meeting (prep deck by 5/24).

### Projects (one next action each)

- [ ] **MNMNOTE blog #28** — next: publish Friday 5/22
- [ ] **Search refactor** — next: spike compound index approach in branch
- [ ] **Quarterly review** — next: schedule the 90-min slot for week 22
- [ ] **House: roof inspection** — next: text three contractors

### Waiting on

- Priya — ADR-0015 review (3 days)
- Accountant — May receipt (1 week)
- Customs — passport renewal status

## Get Creative (6 min)

### Someday / maybe

- Spike: typed weekly notes as structured data, queryable
- Read: *The Effective Executive*, Drucker
- Talk: propose a 25-min weekly-review session at $WORK

### Open questions for next week

- Does the 30-min cap survive a quarter-end week?
- Is Sunday a daily note or part of the weekly?

## Plan for next week (≤3)

- [ ] Ship the v0.5 export — by Wed
- [ ] Search refactor spike — by Thu
- [ ] Quarterly review scheduled — by Fri

## Shutdown

- [x] "Schedule shutdown, complete." [^2]

## Links

- [[2026-W19]] · [[2026-W21]]
- [Daily 2026-05-15](../daily/2026-05-15.md)
- [PR #842](https://github.com/example/repo/pull/842)

Three blocks, one file, one screen. The structure is David Allen's three-phase checklist — Get Clear, Get Current, Get Creative — taken from the official GTD Weekly Review one-pager.¹¹ Asian Efficiency summarizes the same three phases as: Get Clear (collect loose papers, get inbox to zero, empty your head); Get Current (review calendars, projects, next actions, waiting-for lists, and checklists); Get Creative (review someday/maybe items and explore new ideas).⁸ The shutdown line at the bottom is Cal Newport's: he ends his own day by saying "the magic phrase: 'schedule shutdown, complete.'"² Borrow the phrase. It costs nothing and the closure is real.

How to use it (30-minute version)

The system runs as one Friday session of thirty minutes, ending with the shutdown phrase. Tiago Forte calls the practice "your scheduled departure from chaos back into order."³ Borrow that framing too. The three blocks below are the same checklist David Allen has shipped since 2001 — the cap is the new constraint.

Get Clear (12 minutes)

1. Inbox to zero. Email, Slack DMs, physical inbox, notes inbox. Apply Allen's two-minute rule: anything under two minutes, do it now; otherwise capture it. The principle is simple — Allen's central claim, per Wikipedia, is that "there is an inverse relationship between things on your mind and those things getting done."⁴
2. Empty your head. Open the Capture block in the template and write every open loop you can think of for two minutes. Don't sort. Asian Efficiency cites Allen verbatim: "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them."⁸
3. Close the loose tabs and stray docs. Browser tabs go into read-later/. Anything else lands in the notes inbox to be processed at the next daily.

Get Current (12 minutes)

1. Calendar review: minus two, plus four. Look back two weeks and forward four. Nothing else. The two-week look-back catches dropped balls; the four-week look-forward catches deck-prep and travel.
2. Projects: one next action each. Walk the project list. Every project must have exactly one next physical action named. If a project has no next action, it is a wish. Allen's GTD distinguishes a "project" — anything requiring more than one action — from an "action," and treats the next-action discipline as the operational core.⁴
3. Waiting-on list. Who owes you what. Note the date you asked. Anything older than seven days, nudge.

Get Creative (6 minutes)

1. Someday/maybe. Three to five items max — spikes, books, conversations. Promote anything that has graduated to a real project; delete anything you no longer want.
2. Open questions. One or two. They are next week's agenda.
3. Plan for next week (≤3). Three items. The cap is load-bearing — three items with named outcomes outperform seven items as a wishlist.

Then say schedule shutdown, complete² and close the laptop. Thirty minutes.

How to customize it

The template is a backbone; the labels are negotiable. Three common variations cover most working lives — Bullet-Journal monthly migration, PARA project-list cleanup, and Stephen Covey's Quadrant II weekly compass. Pick the one whose vocabulary matches yours, or invent your own. The discipline is the cap, not the section names.

Variation A — Bullet Journal monthly migration

For Ryder Carroll readers. The Bullet Journal Method, devised in college in the late 1990s and shared publicly in 2013, codifies "monthly logging" as "a place for long-term plans or important events each month, and future logging is for long-term projects that may take multiple months or years to complete."¹² Tasks that did not close get migrated — Wikipedia notes the use of "right-facing angle brackets (>) for 'migrated' tasks moved to this list from another list."¹² The weekly file becomes the migration sieve: every Friday, every open task either closes, gets a date, or gets > migrated to next week's note.

## Monthly migration (Friday of week 4)

- > Review Q3 OKRs (move to next month)
- > Read Drucker (carry; still relevant)
- x Cancel the unused subscription (closed late)
- - Idea: write a post on slow software (note, not task)

Variation B — PARA project list cleanup

For Tiago Forte readers. Forte's PARA method partitions everything into "Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives — each containing a small number of subfolders."¹³ The weekly review is where the partition gets re-balanced: a project that finished moves to Archives; an area that has no current project gets a new one or gets archived. Forte names "Weekly and Monthly Reviews" as one of the three habits "most important to your Second Brain."⁷ Add a PARA block to the weekly note:

## PARA tidy

### Projects (active, with end-date)
- MNMNOTE v0.5 export — ship by 2026-05-27
- Apartment lease renewal — sign by 2026-06-15

### Areas (ongoing, no end-date)
- Fitness — 3x/week minimum
- Writing — one post per week

### Resources (just-in-case)
- Moved nothing this week.

### Archives (closed this week)
- v0.4 export → archived 2026-05-15

Variation C — Covey's Quadrant II weekly compass

For 7 Habits readers. Stephen Covey's Habit 3 — Put First Things First — runs on a four-quadrant time matrix: Quadrant I (urgent + important), Quadrant II (not urgent + important), Quadrant III (urgent + not important), Quadrant IV (neither). Wikipedia summarizes the prescription: "after completing items in quadrant I, people should spend the majority of their time on II."⁶ Covey's First Things First (1994) added "a worksheet that lists up to seven key roles, with three weekly goals per role."¹⁴ Trim that to four roles and you have a one-screen weekly compass:

## Roles & weekly goals (Quadrant II)

- **Founder** — ship v0.5 export; one customer call
- **Writer** — publish blog #28; outline #29
- **Partner / household** — date night Saturday; roof inspection scheduled
- **Self** — three runs; finish Drucker chapter 1

Roles surface the Q-II work that the projects list quietly hides. Two minutes added; one entire dimension of the week protected. FranklinCovey publishes Covey's renewal framing under Habit 7: "Renewal is the principle—and the process—that empowers us to move on an upward spiral of growth and change, of continuous improvement."¹⁵ The weekly review is the renewal slot.

Why this format works

The format works because it is a forcing function for trust. Tiago Forte frames the weekly review as systems infrastructure: "the master program on which all other programs run."³ After thirty minutes, you stop carrying open loops in your head — Allen's "inverse relationship between things on your mind and those things getting done" stops applying.⁴

The weekly file is where every loose loop lands and gets a date, an owner, or a graveyard. The thirty-minute cap is what makes the muscle survive a busy quarter; without the cap, the practice grows until you skip it and it never returns.

The file shape — one markdown file per ISO week, dated, linked, plain text — is the load-bearing trick. Steph Ango, the Obsidian CEO, makes the point in his July 2023 essay File over app: "File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read."¹⁶ His own review cadence is a fractal: "Every few days I review these journal fragments and compile the salient thoughts […] I then review those reviews monthly, and review the monthly reviews yearly. The result is a fractal web of my life that I can zoom in and out of at varying degrees of detail."¹⁷ The weekly review is the middle layer of that fractal. Skip it and the daily notes do not compound; they accumulate.

The shutdown line at the bottom is the close. Cal Newport explains it as anti-rumination infrastructure: "After I've uttered the magic phrase, if a work-related worry pops to mind, I always answer it with the following thought process: [1] I said the termination phrase. [2] I wouldn't have said this phrase if I hadn't checked over all of my tasks, my calendar, and my weekly plan and decided that everything was captured and I was on top of everything."² Thirty minutes once a week buys back the rest of the week's nervous bandwidth.

Download

The template is a plain markdown file. Copy it from the code block above into any editor — VS Code, Obsidian, Logseq, Bear, iA Writer, Typora, plain Notepad. No installer, no signup, no plugin. Steph Ango's framing applies: files you control, in formats easy to retrieve and read, outlive the tools that made them.¹⁶

Paste the block into templates/weekly.md and copy it to next Friday's ISO week tomorrow. If you want the template open in a clean browser editor with wiki-links and local storage already wired, mnmnote.com loads in a tab — no account, no install, the weekly file is yours forever.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a weekly review actually take?

Thirty minutes once you are in the groove; sixty to ninety the first three weeks. Asian Efficiency tells beginners to "plan for about 60-90 minutes when you are first starting out."⁸ Tiago Forte reports "the ability to go from total chaos to total clarity in 15–30 minutes" once the file shape is fixed.³ Harvard Business Review's "Make Time for the Work That Matters" finds knowledge workers reclaim about a day per week by auditing recurring low-value tasks — the weekly review is the audit hour that makes that day possible.¹⁸

When in the week should I do it?

Friday afternoon is the canonical slot. The work week is fresh, the next week is still negotiable, and the shutdown lands on a real weekend. Cal Newport ends his week with the same close he uses to end his day: "the magic phrase: 'schedule shutdown, complete.'"² Sunday evening is the alternative for parents and shift workers.

Do I need an app for the weekly review?

No. The template above is one markdown file per week. Steph Ango writes that "File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control."¹⁶ Any editor that opens .md works — VS Code, Obsidian, plain Notepad. The format outlives the tool.

What if the review takes three hours?

You are doing it wrong, in a recoverable way. On the GTD forum, one user reports a 6-hour review and another "between 2 and 5 hours (mostly because I get distracted by some items)."⁹ The fix is to time-box the blocks at 12-12-6 minutes and accept that what does not fit becomes a Plan for next week item.

How does the weekly review connect to daily notes?

Daily notes capture; the weekly review processes. The daily file holds plan, log, and open questions for one day; the weekly file rolls them into projects, waiting-on, and someday/maybe. Tiago Forte calls the weekly review "the master program on which all other programs run."³ See the daily notes template for the cycle the weekly review feeds on.

What if I miss a week?

Skip it. A weekly review that punishes you for missing a Friday becomes a guilt machine on Tuesday. Cal Newport's anti-rumination logic — "I wouldn't have said this phrase if I hadn't checked over all of my tasks, my calendar, and my weekly plan"² — only works if the practice is restartable. Open Friday's file and start.

Why three plan items for next week, not seven?

Because three is what you finish. Stephen Covey's First Things First shipped "a worksheet that lists up to seven key roles, with three weekly goals per role"¹⁴ — three per role, not seven total, was the original prescription. A flat list of three keeps the review honest. Seven is a wishlist disguised as a plan.

Will my weekly notes still be readable in twenty years?

Yes — provided you stay in plain markdown. Steph Ango makes the case directly: "Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last."¹⁶ A .md weekly note opens in any editor that exists in 2046. A weekly review locked in a SaaS database may not. The format outlives the tool.

The template above is yours. Copy it, change the section names, throw away the parts you do not use, ship the next version of yourself a slightly clearer file by 5 p.m. Friday.

References