The Weekly Review: The One Habit That Changes Everything
This single practice, championed by GTD and practiced by top performers worldwide, might be the most high-leverage habit you can build.
The weekly review is the linchpin habit that makes everything else work. Without it, your productivity system slowly degrades into chaos. With it, you build compounding momentum toward your most important goals.
Why Weekly Specifically
Daily is too frequent—you can't see the forest for the trees. Monthly is too infrequent—you drift off course for weeks before correcting. Weekly hits the sweet spot.
David Allen's GTD methodology emphasizes the weekly review as the lynchpin of the entire system.
Schedule your weekly review at the same time each week. Sunday evening or Monday morning works best for most people.
The Six-Part Framework
A complete weekly review has six components: Review the past week, celebrate wins, analyze what didn't work, update all project and goal statuses, clear all inboxes, and plan the week ahead.
"Your weekly review is the 'start button' for your week." — David Allen
KeyResults' 3P Framework structures your review into Plans, Progress, and Problems—ensuring you capture what you intended to do, what actually happened, and what got in the way.
The Reflection Questions
Don't just review data—extract insights. Ask: What created momentum this week? Where did I get stuck? What can I do more of?
Sarah's Sunday Review
Sarah opens KeyResults at 6pm Sunday. She starts by reviewing her completed tasks for the week—17 tasks done, 3 carried over.
- She updates her Progress notes with wins: "Shipped the new feature, got positive feedback from the team"
- She documents a Problem: "Got pulled into too many meetings on Wednesday"
- She sets her Plans for next week, marking Tuesday as a focus day for deep work
- She chooses Monday's daily highlight: "Draft the Q1 proposal"
Total time: 25 minutes. Her week is now set up for success.
KeyResults' weekly retrospective feature prompts you with these questions. The act of writing your answers creates metacognitive awareness. The editor supports bold, italic, and bullet point formatting so you can organize your reflections clearly.
The Planning Component
Once you've reviewed the past week, plan the next one. Look at your key results and ask: What progress should I make on each one this week?
Use Cmd/Ctrl+K to quickly jump to weekly planning from anywhere in KeyResults.
Use KeyResults' weekly planning feature to assign your most important tasks to specific days. Format your plans with bullets for action items and bold for priorities.
Capturing Wins and Highlights
Part of every weekly review should include capturing your wins—both big and small.
KeyResults' Journal & Highlights feature lets you record these moments as "Highlight" entries, creating a searchable timeline of your achievements organized by year and category.
During your review, flip to the Journal & Highlights section and add any accomplishments worth remembering. Filter by year to see your progress over time, or group by month to spot patterns.
Don't skip the celebration step. Acknowledging wins builds motivation and helps you recognize what's working.
The Compound Effect
Weekly reviews compound over time. After a month, you have four weeks of patterns to analyze. After a year, you have 52 data points showing your growth trajectory.
KeyResults tracks this automatically through health scores and velocity metrics. You can see how your consistency in weekly reviews correlates with goal achievement over time.
Start Your Weekly Review
Use the 3P Framework to reflect on Plans, Progress, and Problems