Everyone agrees the weekly review is the keystone habit — GTD calls it non-negotiable — and almost everyone skips it. The reason is honest: as usually taught, a review starts from a blank page and a memory. You spend forty minutes just reconstructing what happened from calendars, sent mail, and five apps' worth of breadcrumbs, and there's no energy left for the part that matters: deciding what next week is for.
The fix isn't a better template. It's having something to review. If each day kept even a few lines of notes, the weekly review stops being reconstruction and becomes reading — and reading a week takes about six minutes.
The 15-minute routine
1. Read the week (6 min) Flip through the last five daily pages, oldest first. 2. Carry or kill (4 min) Every open todo: does it deserve next week? Move it or delete it. 3. Pull the wins (2 min) Anything brag-worthy gets a #win if it doesn't have one. 4. Three lines on Friday's page (3 min) What happened. What's still open. What next week is for.
Step 4 is the compounding one. Three honest lines a week is a readable story of a quarter — and when someone asks “what happened with the migration?”, the answer is written on the Friday it happened.
Where day-based notes carry the weight
In Hejour, the review has no setup because the days are already pages: ⌘K opens the calendar and the week is right there to walk through, each day exactly as you left it — todos, meeting headings, the honest sentences from your shutdown ritual. Unfinished todos have already followed you forward, so “carry or kill” is a judgment pass, not a copying job. Items for a specific day next week go there directly — type @monday and write on Monday's page from where you sit.
The #win pass takes two minutes and pays all year: come review season, those lines are your brag document, pre-written. And if standups are part of your week, the same pages answer those too — the daily work log is this habit at day scale.
Protect it with a reminder you can't miss
Put [] weekly review at 16:00 on Friday's page once, make it a routine, and Hejour takes the whole screen when it's time — the review that survives is the one that interrupts you. Hejour is a free download; this Friday, try reading your week instead of remembering it.