AI weekly review workflow
The review itself is not the hard part. Remembering to open every project, book, and thread to check what changed is. This is the workflow that removes that part.
A weekly review only works if it actually happens, and it only actually happens if it does not cost you an hour of clicking through folders first. The workflow here is not a template you fill in, that is a different page. It is the automated sweep: what runs, in what order, and what it hands you at the end.
If you want the review itself as a set of questions to answer, that is the weekly review template. This page is the workflow that runs before you sit down: the pass that gathers everything worth reviewing so the review itself takes ten minutes instead of ninety.
Most people who abandon a weekly review do not abandon it because the questions were wrong. They abandon it because opening the review meant first opening ten other things to remember what happened, and that pre-work quietly ate the thirty minutes they had set aside. Remove the pre-work and the review itself is short enough to actually survive a busy month.
What triggers it
A day and time you set, weekly. It runs on its own; you do not have to remember to kick it off.
What the system does
1. Sweeps every active project and thread
Not a sample. Every project file, every open question, every logged decision, checked against how recently each one was touched.
2. Flags what is stale or waiting on you
A project that has not moved in three weeks, a question logged two reviews ago with no answer, a follow-up that was drafted and never sent. Staleness is a signal worth surfacing, not hiding.
3. Rebuilds one status view from the source files
Rather than you cross-referencing ten project files by hand, the system reconciles them into a single current view, the same reconciliation pattern behind project status tracking that updates itself.
4. Surfaces what needs your input, grouped
Open questions and decisions awaiting your call, grouped by project, so the review is a pass through a short list rather than a search through everything.
The difference from a status meeting. A status meeting asks everyone what changed. This workflow already knows what changed, because it has been watching the files all week. The meeting, if you still have one, starts from the answer instead of from zero.
Picture a Friday afternoon with six active projects. The old version of this review means opening six folders, trying to remember what happened in each one this week, and hoping nothing important slipped past you in the noise. The swept version means opening one page that already says: three projects moved and are current, one has a decision waiting on you, one has not been touched in eleven days, and one has an open question from two weeks ago nobody answered. Ten minutes, not ninety.
What lands in front of you
One rebuilt status view across every active project, a short list of what is stale and needs a decision, and the open questions still waiting on you, sorted so the oldest ones do not quietly age out of view. Nothing here is new work; it is everything that already happened this week, gathered into one place for the first time.
What you still decide
What to actually do about each stale item: kill it, revive it, or leave it another week on purpose. The sweep tells you what has not moved; it does not tell you whether that is a problem. A project can sit untouched for a good reason, and the review is where you get to say so instead of the system silently flagging it as a failure every week.
The review and the template are two different jobs
Keep these separate on purpose: this page is the automated sweep that gathers the material, and the weekly review template is the actual set of questions you answer once it lands in front of you. Running both together is also the backbone of a good weekly planning system.
Confusing the two is how most weekly review habits collapse in practice. People try to build the sweep and the reflection into a single ritual, and when the sweep takes too long the reflection gets cut first, which is exactly backwards: the reflection is the part that actually improves how you run things, and the sweep is the part that should be invisible. Keep the sweep invisible enough and it pairs naturally with the daily brief for the days in between reviews.
Make the sweep invisible enough to survive a busy month
The book covers the hub the sweep reads and the pass that gathers it, in plain files, so the pre-work stops eating the half hour you set aside for thinking.
Get the bookSee a week gather itself before Friday
The same weekly sweep, built for a company: every project checked, everything stale surfaced, and one current status view rebuilt before anyone sits down to review it. Try the demo.
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