The Friday Frame: A Repeatable Weekly Review Template

Doing a review by feel gives you results that depend on your mood. Some Fridays you look at everything, others you glance at your inbox and close the laptop. A weekly review template fixes that by giving you the same steps each time. This post gives you a named, reusable version, the Friday Frame, built from four short parts.

The Friday Frame is my label for a simple way to organise the review. It is a custom framework for this post, not an established method, and it borrows its shape from David Allen's published Get Clear, Get Current and Get Creative checklist. It has not been tested or validated by research. Use it as a starting structure and change it freely. Lesson 6.4 teaches the same routine in a guided form: Your weekly review.

The Friday Frame is four parts, Sweep, Score, Seek and Set, each with one question and a time limit, ending in a written top three.

The four parts at a glance

The times add up to ten minutes. The mapping is a loose match, not an official one.

Part 1: Sweep

Sweep is about getting everything out of your head and into one place. Open your inbox, your messages, your notes from the week and your calendar. Look for three kinds of thing.

• Promises you made, such as "I will send that on Monday".
• Things you are waiting on from other people.
• Small jobs you can finish in two minutes.

Do the two minute jobs now. Put the promises on your task list. Put the waiting items on a Waiting on list. Allen's checklist includes the same ideas: process what has piled up, review the calendar for actions it triggered, and review the list of things you are waiting for.

An assistant can help here. Paste in a week of call notes or messages and ask it to list every commitment and follow-up it can find. Check the result against the source, since it can miss items or invent them. The lessons on email and call notes set up the kind of raw material that makes this part quick.

Part 2: Score

Score is the numbers. Choose two or three figures that tell you whether the business is moving. For a shop it may be orders and money in. For a coach it may be enquiries and booked calls. For a creator it may be posts published and replies received.

Rules for Score:

• Use the same figures every week so you can compare.
• Pull them from your own records, not from memory.
• Write the number, not a comment about it.

Do not add more than three. If you want a longer list, read the metrics post.

Part 3: Seek

Seek is the thinking part. Write down one thing that worked and one that stalled, and a quick guess about why each happened. Use this prompt, which you can reuse every week:

What is one thing I would repeat, one thing I would stop or change, and what do I think caused each?

The word "guess" matters. A single week cannot prove a cause. If a post did well, it may have been the topic, the timing or luck. Write your guess down anyway. After a month of notes you can check which guesses came up repeatedly.

Part 4: Set

Set is where the review earns its keep. Write next week's top three as outcomes, each with a time.

Research on implementation intentions, summarised by Peter Gollwitzer, describes if-then plans that link a situation to an action. The evidence reviewed suggests that these plans help people start what they intend to do. A review-friendly version:

• If it is 9am Monday, then I send the three overdue invoices.
• If I finish lunch on Tuesday, then I record the next product video.
• If it is Thursday 4pm, then I schedule the weekend post.

Three is a limit, not a target. If something new feels urgent, replace one item rather than adding a fourth. For the daily layer, Plan your day in five minutes shows how to turn the three into a day plan.

Running the Frame

1. Set the slotPick a fixed time on Friday and put it in your calendar. Ten minutes is enough.
2. Open one pageKeep a single note called Friday Frame. Add a new dated section each week.
3. Run the four partsSweep, Score, Seek, Set, in that order, with a visible timer.
4. Stop at tenWhen the timer ends, finish the sentence you are on and close the note.
5. Read it MondayStart Monday by reading your top three before you open your inbox.

A quick illustration

This is a made up example. Say you run a small cleaning business.

• Sweep: two quote requests unanswered, one customer waiting on a rebooking date.
• Score: jobs completed, quotes sent, quotes accepted.
• Seek: the quotes sent the same day got more replies. Guess: speed matters. Stalled: the Thursday jobs ran late. Guess: too many bookings in one day.
• Set: reply to both quotes by 9am Monday, cap Thursday at three jobs, and send the rebooking date by Tuesday noon.

None of those numbers or findings are real. They show the shape of a completed frame.

Questions people ask

Is the Friday Frame an official method?

No. It is a simple structure built for this post from the shape of a published checklist. Treat it as a starting point.

Can I run it on another day?

Yes. The day matters less than doing it at the same time each week.

What if I have more than three priorities?

Pick the three that would matter most if nothing else got done, and park the rest on a list to look at next week.

Where to go next

Try one full round this Friday, then adjust. If you want a blank page to copy, see the free template post. For the guided version, Lesson 6.4 walks through it step by step: Your weekly review.