A Weekly Review Template in 7 Days: A Worked Example

Plenty of articles claim to show how someone got a weekly review template working, complete with numbers. This one does not, because the numbers would be invented. Instead, here is an honest worked example: a made up business, a made up week, and the real steps you can copy. Everything about "Maya" below is illustrative. She is not a real customer, and the figures are placeholders.

The aim is to show how a weekly review template goes from nothing to a routine in seven days, what tends to go wrong, and how to adjust. Lesson 6.4 gives you the guided version: Your weekly review.

Set up the weekly review template in short pieces across a week, run it for the first time on Friday, and expect to trim it afterwards.

The setup: a pretend business

Say Maya runs a small online shop selling hand printed cards. She takes orders through her website, answers customer messages, posts on social media a few times a week and handles her own invoicing for a couple of wholesale buyers. Her complaint is familiar: by Friday she cannot say what happened, and Monday begins with a hunt through her inbox.

She decides to build a weekly review. She wants it to take ten minutes and to end with three priorities for next week.

Day by day

Monday: write down what a good review would contain

Maya spends ten minutes listing what she wishes she knew on Friday. Her list: which messages need a reply, which wholesale invoice is unpaid, how many orders came in, which post got replies, and what she promised to do. She does not build anything yet.

Tuesday: choose the numbers

She picks three figures she can find in under two minutes: number of orders, money received, number of new enquiries. She notes where each one lives so she can open it quickly. This follows the idea of keeping to a few numbers rather than tracking everything.

Wednesday: borrow a structure

She does not invent a layout. She looks at David Allen's official Getting Things Done weekly review checklist, which is organised as Get Clear, Get Current and Get Creative, and keeps the shape while dropping steps that do not fit a one person shop. Her cuts are anything about paper in trays and long project lists.

Thursday: add a waiting list and a top three

She makes a short list called Waiting on, and a spot at the bottom for next week's top three. Both are inspired by steps in the official checklist: reviewing what you are waiting for, and capturing next actions.

Friday: the first run

She sets a timer for ten minutes and runs the review. This is where reality shows up.

What commonly goes wrong on the first run

First runs rarely fit in ten minutes. Here is what to expect, and none of it is a sign of failure.

• It runs long. Allen's own checklist is long, and writers who adapt it warn that people over organise. Maya's fix is to stop at the timer and finish the rest next week.
• The numbers are hard to find. She had said two minutes, but one of her sources took five. She writes down a quicker place to look next time.
• The top three are vague. "Do marketing" is not a plan. She rewrites it as "Post the new card set on Thursday at 10am".
• She forgets what she promised. The calendar check turns up a call from Tuesday with a follow-up she had not noted.

Adjusting after the first run

1. Cut one stepShe removes the step that took longest and added least. Her old filing review goes.
2. Move one numberShe replaces a number that was slow to find with one she can read in a minute.
3. Tighten the top threeEach item gets a verb and a time.
4. Book the next oneShe sets a recurring Friday entry in her calendar.

Where AI fits

In week two, Maya tries pasting her week's customer messages into an AI assistant and asking it to list anything she promised or anyone waiting on a reply. This is a common use. She checks the list against her inbox, because assistants can miss items or add ones that were never there. She also leaves out customer addresses and payment details unless she has checked the tool's privacy terms.

If you want to set up the email side of that, see A clean inbox every morning, and for call follow-ups, Notes and next steps from every call.

What you should and should not expect

Here is a fair way to judge your own first week:

• Did you run it in about ten minutes or close?
• Did it catch at least one thing you would have forgotten?
• Did you start Monday by reading your top three?

If you can say yes to two of three, keep going. If not, trim steps before you decide the method is not for you.

Four weeks later: what to check

Back in the example, Maya reads four weeks of notes on the last Friday of the month. A real review of notes like that looks for patterns. Do the same enquiry types stall? Does one task roll over every week? Is one number always flat? She does not invent outcomes from this. She picks one change to try the next month, such as answering wholesale enquiries within one working day.

This is the point of the exercise. The template is not the achievement. The habit of looking at your week, choosing a small number of actions and checking them again later is.

Questions people ask

Are Maya's results real?

No. Maya and her business are an invented example, and no figures are claimed.

How long until a weekly review feels natural?

There is no fixed number. Most people need a few runs before the steps settle, so judge it after about three or four Fridays.

What should I do on Friday if I have no numbers?

Start with a count of anything you can count, such as messages answered or tasks finished, and improve the choice later.

Where to go next

Copy the free template to skip the blank page, then compare yourself with the metrics post. The step by step build is in Lesson 6.4: Your weekly review.