A weekly work review that doesn't die

Why reviews die in two weeks

Most review templates have too many sections. What went well, what didn't, lessons, action items — filling all of it takes half an hour, and skipping one busy week usually ends the habit. The failure is not discipline. It is the weight of the format.

Framing the review as reflective writing also fails. What stays useful from a weekly review is not sentiment but facts and judgment: what you did, and why you did it that way. With those two, everything else can be reconstructed later.

Five lines is enough

Don't summarize the whole week. Pick one thing worth keeping and stop at five lines.

• One thing from this week worth keeping — one, not everything
• One line of judgment — why you did it that way; a rejected direction counts
• One piece of evidence — a screenshot, link, or document. It anchors the memory later
• One thing you're stuck on — a handoff note to next week's self
• The first task of next week — deciding what to open on Monday makes the week start faster

Fix the day and time

A plan to write whenever is a plan to never write. Pick a slot — Friday before closing, five minutes — and put it in the calendar. If Fridays collapse in your line of work, Monday morning works too: you start the week by opening the last one.

Never backfill skipped weeks. Reconstructing two weeks at once raises the cost and kills the habit again. Leave the gap and write the current week.

What the pile is for

Once a week means 52 entries a year. A quarterly review means scanning 13. At year-end evaluation, the evidence is already organized before anyone asks.

The biggest payoff comes at resume time. Instead of reconstructing three years from memory, you select from dated, evidenced entries. Invention becomes editing.