Your weekly review: Claude prepares, you decide

The weekly review is the half hour that goes first when a week gets busy, and the expensive part is not the thinking. It is the walk before it: open every list, find what moved, find what went quiet, count the Inbox, and only then make the three or four decisions the review exists for.

Claude can do the clerk’s half: connected to your outline, it lists what moved this week, the next actions under Projects that are open, overdue or untouched for two weeks, and how full your Inbox is. Which project matters, what to drop and what to promote from Someday stay your calls, because they are judgements, not facts Claude can read off the outline.

Set it up

A connector you approve starts with your whole outline; you choose read and write, or read only. Choose Read and write your outline if Claude is to tick what it can check and draft next actions. Claude Free allows one custom connector, and on Team and Enterprise an Owner adds it first.

The walk, as searches

Each stop on the walk is one call, and every search after the first is focused on Projects: search takes that bullet as its focus and looks nowhere else. Without the focus, layout:todo finds every unticked checkbox in your outline, the review’s own checklist and the lines an old run left open among them, and each run you leave half ticked adds to it. The operators go in the query as written here, without quotes:

• What moved: changed:this week, over the whole outline. It counts in whole days from Monday, so on a Monday morning changed:last week reaches back to the Monday before.
• Next actions still open: layout:todo is:incomplete. is:incomplete on its own only means not ticked, so it also matches every plain bullet.
• Overdue: layout:todo is:incomplete date-before:today. It reads the dates written in the bullets, so a date that is not a deadline counts too.
• Gone quiet: layout:todo is:incomplete changed:<2 weeks ago.
• Ticked this week: is:complete changed:this week. It also catches a bullet ticked earlier and edited this week, so read it as close, not exact.
• The Inbox: find the bullet called Inbox, and the tree tool on it with depth 0 answers how many bullets are waiting directly under it without reading any of them.

Projects > layout:todo is:incomplete looks like the same thing and is looser. The part before the arrow matches any bullet whose text or note contains the word, so a template whose note mentions Projects puts its whole tree in range. The focus is the exact version.

Prepare my weekly review in Pando. Change nothing until I say so.
First find the bullets called Projects and Inbox.
- What moved:   search changed:this week
- Open:         search layout:todo is:incomplete, focus Projects
- Overdue:      search layout:todo is:incomplete date-before:today,
                focus Projects
- Gone quiet:   search layout:todo is:incomplete
                changed:<2 weeks ago, focus Projects
- Inbox:        tree on Inbox, depth 0
- Stalled:      tree on Projects; name each project with no
                unticked todo under it
Then draft one next action for each stalled project and show
me the drafts before you write them. When I say go, write this
week’s run under RUNS from MASTER, and tick only what a count
settles.

A quiet project line is not a quiet project

changed: reads when a bullet itself last changed. Ticking or editing a next action does not touch the project above it, and moving a bullet does not count as changing it. So a project whose next action moved on Tuesday can still look untouched on its own line: judge staleness on the next actions. No search operator finds a project with no open next action at all, so for that one Claude reads Projects with tree and checks each project’s children.

What Claude can settle, and what it cannot

A checklist line like Inbox to zero is settled by a count, so Claude can tick it once the count reads zero, and a drafted next action can go under its project for you to keep or delete. Where it could not settle something, it can say why in the line’s note and leave the box open.

Claude can name a project nobody touched in two weeks. Whether that is a problem or a project you quietly stopped caring about, the outline cannot say. Which project matters next week, what to drop and what to promote from Someday are the calls the review exists for.

The review as a record

The Weekly Review template in the gallery at /templates holds a master checklist that is never ticked and a RUNS branch for the dated copies. Press Show in my Pando and the whole branch is copied to the top of your Home, yours to edit. Each Friday you duplicate the master (from the bullet’s menu, or Ctrl+Shift+D at a desk, Cmd+Shift+D on a Mac), then date the copy and move it under RUNS. Claude has no copy tool: it reads the master with tree and writes the dated run under RUNS in one create call.

The GTD template in the same gallery lays out Inbox, Projects, Waiting for and Someday as branches of one tree, so the Inbox and Projects the prompt looks for are there from the start. It carries its own Weekly review checklist too, so keep one of the two.

Protect the master against agents only: choose Protect it from changes in its menu, open the menu again, choose How it is protected, and under Refuses pick Agents only. Claude can then read it and never tick it. A lock stops changes, not reading, and a copy arrives unlocked, so the dated run stays open to both of you.

Where this is not the answer

• Pando does not start Claude, so nothing is prepared until Claude is asked. Ask on Friday, or whenever your review is.
• If your projects live in another app, this does not help: through Pando, Claude reads only what is in your outline.
• Approved as Read your outline only, Claude can write only in a bullet you gave it to remember in, if there is one. It cannot tick or draft anything in your lists, and the review comes back as an answer in the chat.
• Claude’s own memory is kept as a set of topics about you, and each project in Claude has its own. It holds what Claude remembers about you, not your projects with their next actions and ticks, which is what a review walks.

What it costs

Nothing, for 1,000 bullets, with every feature included and no payment card. The template’s master has four items, so a dated run is five bullets, and a year of Fridays is about 260 of them.

Deeper

• Notes your agent can read and cannot change
• A task list your agent ticks and you can read

Connect an agent, about two minutes · The twelve tools · Which note apps an agent can reach · Who runs this