The weekly review that survives past March
by Andreas Tissen · · updated
It is Friday, a little after four. The weekly review has been in your calendar since January. For the third Friday in a row you drag it to Monday, and on Monday you drag it again. By March the entry is gone and nobody noticed.
If you run Getting Things Done, a bullet journal or any planning system, you know this half hour: the time when you stop producing and check the system itself, what is stuck, what went silent, what next week needs. Below is what the review is for, why it slides, and a shape that makes it cheaper and leaves a record.
Clear, current, creative
David Allen made the review the step that holds Getting Things Done together, and his version has three parts. Get clear: empty every inbox and loose note. Get current: walk the projects, Waiting for and the calendar. Get creative: look at Someday and at new ideas.
What the review buys you is trust in your lists. A project list you have not looked at for three weeks still has projects on it, but you no longer believe it, so you start keeping the real list in your head again. At that point the system has stopped working even though every app is still installed.
The bill comes first
You pay the whole cost before anything useful comes back. The inbox app, the task app, the shared document with Waiting for, the notes file with Someday: twenty minutes of switching before the two or three decisions that were the reason for the half hour.
The review also leaves no trace. You tick nothing anyone can see, so a skipped week looks exactly like a week you did, and after a few of them you cannot say when the habit went.
A master and its runs
Two changes deal with both. Everything the review reads lives in one tree, so Inbox, Projects, Waiting for and Someday are branches next to each other and the walk is scrolling one screen with the other branches folded. And the review itself becomes a checklist with a history.
In Pando, the outliner I build, that record is a branch with two parts. Pando keeps your notes as bullets inside bullets, in the browser and on the phone, and Claude reads and writes in it through a connector.
The master is never ticked. Each Friday you copy it into RUNS, put the date in the copy's name and tick the copy as you go, newest on top. The dated runs show which weeks you skipped, because a skipped week is a missing date, and a step you have ticked without thinking five weeks in a row is one you can delete. Start with the four steps in the picture and add a fifth only when a missed item has cost you something real.
The reminder stays where it was, in your calendar; the review itself now has a place to happen and a history. The same master-and-runs shape keeps checklists in general usable, and the tree the review reads is laid out in Getting Things Done in one outline. The branch in the picture is the weekly review template after two Fridays; the template starts with one empty run.
What Claude can tick
Once Pando is connected to Claude (claude.ai, the desktop app or the phone app, as a custom connector), Claude can read your tree and write in it. That covers the part of the review that needs no judgement, and the template's agent bullet holds the prompt. Its core, word for word: "In the new copy, pre-tick only what you can verify by reading my tree: for example, tick the inbox item only if my Inbox branch has zero children, and write the count you found into that item's note."
So on Friday you ask Claude to start the review. It copies the master into RUNS with today's date, ticks the inbox step if Inbox is empty and writes "0 items" in its note, and leaves the rest open. If last week's run still had open boxes, it names them in the new run's note. Which project to drop and what next week is for stay with you.
The free plan holds 5,000 bullets with every feature; Pro is 3 EUR a month for no limit. To keep a review that writes its own record, create a free account and connect Claude.