A weekly review that takes ten minutes.

A weekly review is the one habit every productivity system agrees on. Todoist ships it as a template. Things users run it on Sunday evening. The Obsidian forums have a plugin stack for it. David Allen put it at the center of Getting Things Done.

It is also the habit most people drop first, and the reason is boring. The review takes an hour because the material is in six places.

What a review actually is

Allen’s version has three parts. Get clear: empty every inbox and write down whatever is still in your head. Get current: look at your lists, your projects, and the week behind and ahead. Get creative: read the someday list and let yourself add something.

Strip the names and it is one move. You look at everything you committed to, and you decide again what it deserves.

That is quick when everything is in front of you. It is slow when you have to go and gather it.

The stack that makes it slow

The Obsidian answer is real and it works. You turn on Daily Notes, add Periodic Notes for the weekly page, Templater to fill it in, Tasks to find the open items, and Dataview to query the whole thing. The weekly note then builds itself, and building it was the weekend.

The task-app answer is a recurring to-do that says “weekly review” with a checklist pasted into it. It reminds you to open four other apps.

Neither is wrong. Both spend the first twenty minutes of the review on getting to the review.

What is already collected in Remlo

Remlo creates a page for every day, so the week is five to seven pages in a row. Scroll them. Whatever you thought about on Tuesday is on Tuesday.

Every to-do you typed in any of those pages is on the To-dos page, including the ones from notes you wrote three weeks ago. Read it top to bottom once. Delete what stopped being true. Set a day on what is now real.

The board holds the stages you defined. The column of things you are waiting on is the one worth reading slowly, because a waiting item never reminds you on its own.

Habits sit in the same app. Each one has a momentum chart, so the week shows up as a line. A habit that used to be five times a week and is now two is the state to catch, and it is visible in ten seconds.

Project pages list every day that mentioned them, since links point both ways. Open the project, read the week’s mentions in order, and you have the status without writing it.

The ten minutes

Here is mine, on a Friday.

Scroll the week’s daily pages. Anything that deserves its own page gets a link and a name. Anything that is still just a thought stays.

Open the To-dos page. Clear the ones I will not do. Give the real ones a day.

Look at the board. Move what has moved. Chase what is waiting.

Look at the habit charts. Decide one thing for next week.

Then close it. Nothing was gathered, because nothing needed gathering.

What Remlo does not do for a review

It has no calendar. Looking back at last week’s meetings and ahead at next week’s stays in your calendar app, and a review that needs that part will touch two apps.

It has no recurring review prompt of its own. Make “weekly review” a weekly habit and let the chart nag you.

It has no sharing. If your review involves a team, it belongs somewhere your team can see it.

Remlo is native on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, works offline, and syncs through your own iCloud.

The review gets done when it takes the length of a coffee.