A fifteen-minute weekly review

A review sounds like a big event: a whole afternoon, an open notebook, pages of writing. Because it sounds so heavy, many people never do one at all.

In practice, looking back once a week for about fifteen minutes is plenty. Fifteen minutes is a suggestion, not a rule. In a quiet week five minutes will do, and if you want to take longer, nothing stops you. What matters is not the length but having a small, regular slot that is only for looking back.

Here is an order you can follow: three steps, about five minutes each.

Step one: read through the week

Do not draw conclusions yet. Just look.

Counting from the day of your first record, every 7 days make one period. If you recorded anything in those 7 days, a weekly recap card appears on the Today page when the period ends. It shows how many days had records, how many expenses you logged, how much time you recorded, how many habit check-ins you made and how many tasks you finished. The card is a plain count. It does not call the AI and does not use any credits, so just open it.

After the card, scroll through your time entries and your spending list. You do not need to read every line. Watch for two kinds of things:

• What keeps repeating, such as working late several nights in a row
• What surprises you, such as one kind of spending being higher than you thought

When you spot one, make a mental note or jot down a line. This step is only for collecting, not judging. Write it down first, judge later explains why it helps to keep the two apart.

Step two: check this week's goals

Open the Goals page and look at what you wrote under This week.

Each goal has tasks and habits underneath it, and ticking off a task moves its progress forward, so how much you got done is easy to see.

As you go through them, ask yourself three questions:

1. Which ones did I get done?
2. Which ones did not happen, and why? Not enough time, a goal that was too big, or something more important came up?
3. Which ones do I no longer want to do?

A goal that did not happen is not a failure. Often it was simply written too big, or the week was not the right week for it. The ones you no longer want, delete or archive. Keeping them around only makes you wince at them every week.

Step three: pick one or two things for next week

The last step has one job: choose one or two things for next week and write them down.

It can be a new goal for the week, or the unfinished one from this week cut down to a smaller piece. Put it on the Goals page and attach one or two concrete tasks, so next week you can start right away.

One or two is enough. Write down seven or eight and next week will most likely end with another list that does not add up. For how to write a goal you can actually act on, see How to write a goal you can act on.

When you want a longer view

The weekly review looks at one week. To look back over a longer stretch, open Insight.

Once you have enough records, Insight retells your recent records across a few areas such as health, career and family, and sets them against your own earlier records. When there is not enough yet, it says so plainly instead of making something up. When you have new records and open Insight, it generates one automatically, which uses the AI and costs credits. To generate another later, tap Refresh; the note under the button says it uses credits.

It does not judge for you. It only puts what you wrote side by side. Whether to change anything afterwards, and how, is still up to you.