Recipes
A weekly review
Ten minutes once a week, mostly automated.
The scenario
Weekly reviews fail because assembling one is work. This one assembles itself, so the only thing left is deciding.
Set it up once
- 1
Turn on the weekly recap email
It arrives whether or not you remembered. Settings Notifications Weekly recap. See email digests.
- 2
Set a repeating reminder
Same day, same time, every week. See repeating reminders.
- 3
Put Move and Tag in your selection bar
The whole review is bulk actions. See customize the bars.
The weekly rhythm
Read the digest. Two minutes. What you wrote, what you finished, what carried. See weekly digest.
Clear the backlog. Open the Things view, filter to uncompleted to-dos, sort oldest first. Select all and decide in one pass: move to Today, or cancel. See the Things view.
Anything that has carried for more than two weeks gets canceled, not moved. It is telling you something.
Look at the week ahead. Open week view, see whether any day is already impossible, and move things off it. See week view.
Make it yours
- If you have review dates on lists, do the Review hub in the same sitting. See the Review hub.
- If the backlog is huge the first time, cancel more than you move. It gets much shorter afterwards.
What this looks like after a month
The backlog stabilises. The first review is unpleasant because it surfaces months of things you were quietly avoiding. By the fourth, it takes six minutes and the list is short, because carrying something past two reviews stops feeling acceptable.