How to do a weekly review that ties back to your daily execution score

Once a week, start from the score, not the inbox. Mark last week's Top 3 as done, partial or not started, and read them against your daily and weekly execution score. Write one short reflection on the pattern. Then set next week's Top 3 on the same daily execution deck. Allow about 30–40 minutes once practised.

Sources: the Review-Forward Loop and timings from Goals & Progress; deck anatomy from the Billion Habit FAQ ; what the weekly score is from weekly score.

Broken down:

1. Pull the evidence. Last week's Top 3 and your weekly score (plus day scores, if you have them).
2. Assess. Each priority is done, partial or not started. No adjectives.
3. Reflect. One pattern, in writing.
4. Prioritise. Three outcomes for next week, entered on the deck.
5. Bridge. One sentence: do these three serve this month's aim?

If you want to know how the score itself works, read what a weekly score is. This page assumes you have one and shows what to do with it.

Goals & Progress makes the case plainly: "Seven days is the smallest unit of time where you can meaningfully measure progress on a goal, spot a habit forming or breaking, and adjust before a full month slips away." Daily review is "too reactive" (you track tasks instead of trends); monthly is "too slow" (problems compound before you catch them) (Goals & Progress).

On a daily execution deck, the day score is the raw material and the week is where it becomes a decision. One bad Tuesday is noise. Three weeks where the Top 3 slip on the same afternoon is a pattern you can act on.

Goals & Progress warns that "the fastest way to hollow out a weekly review is to skip the backward look and jump straight to next week's to-do list." Their rule is the one to keep: "Always score and reflect before you plan." A combined session is fine. It just has to run in that order.

David Allen's Getting Things Done made the weekly review famous as a sweep of every open commitment: get clear, get current, get creative. Goals & Progress notes it "excels at system maintenance but doesn't deeply address goal progress, pattern recognition, or emotional reflection."

Adapted from Goals & Progress.

If you run a capped deck, the goal-focused core is the part that matters: score, reflect, set three. Add a light Collect only if open loops are what actually blocked your Top 3. A daily execution deck is not an inbox manager, and this review doesn't pretend to replace email zero.

The steps below adapt Goals & Progress's five-step Review-Forward Loop (Collect, Assess, Reflect, Prioritise, Bridge) to a deck. The timings are theirs; the order is the point.

Collect (5 minutes): light only

Gather what blocked last week's Top 3: a waiting-for, a note from a meeting, a promise you made someone. You are not processing every inbox. If the inbox is overflowing, write that down; it's data for the next step.

Assess (10 minutes): start from the score

This is where a deck review differs from a journal.

• Put last week's Top 3 in front of you and mark each one done, partial or not started. For partials, note where you stopped and what blocked you.
• Read your weekly score alongside them, plus each day's score across the last seven days if you have them (on the deck or noted down). Did the high-scoring days line up with the Top 3 moving, or were they full of easy wins?
• Note anything that never made it onto the deck at all but ate the week.

Goals & Progress cites a meta-analysis of 138 studies (Harkin et al., 2016, Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229): prompting people to monitor goal progress had a medium positive effect on attainment (d = 0.40), strongest when progress was physically recorded and publicly reported. Write the assessment down. A score you only glance at isn't a record.

Reflect (10 minutes): one pattern, in writing

Use the same three prompts every week so the answers become comparable:

1. What moved my goals forward?
2. What created friction or resistance?
3. What would I do differently?

Two or three written sentences beat a mental review. If a Top 3 slipped three weeks running, the cause probably isn't willpower. It might be the time of day, the size of the item, or a priority that needs rescoping. An optional extra: note which work drained you and which gave you energy.

Prioritise (10 minutes): set next week's Top 3

Goals & Progress suggests three to five weekly priorities. A deck is capped at three on purpose ("three priorities, not an endless backlog", FAQ), so pick three outcomes, not a task list. For each one, an if-then plan helps: "If it's Tuesday at 9am, I draft the proposal." Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions found goals paired with specific if-then plans were significantly more likely to be completed (via Goals & Progress).

Then put them where you'll see them tomorrow morning: on the deck, next to Today and your relationship touches. How to hold three priorities beside the day's schedule: Top 3 and non-negotiables on one screen.

Bridge (5 minutes): one check upwards

Ask one question: are these three moving this month's or this quarter's aim, or just keeping me busy? If there's a gap, swap one priority. Then glance two or three weeks ahead for anything that needs preparation this week.

Copy this into a notebook, a document or the notes on your deck.

• Week of: [dates]
• Weekly score: [as your deck shows it] · Day scores, last seven days: [if you have them]
• Last week's Top 3: each marked done / partial / not started
• What worked: one or two sentences
• What didn't, and why: one or two sentences
• Pattern I'm noticing: one sentence, across recent weeks
• Next week's Top 3: each with a when / where / if-then
• Month check: one sentence: on track or drifting?
• Open loops: only the ones that blocked the Top 3

Template sections adapted from Goals & Progress, rewritten for a deck. This page publishes no score formula: use the score your deck shows.

Expect up to an hour for the first few sessions and 30–40 minutes once practised (Goals & Progress). Sunday evening and Saturday morning are popular because you have distance from the working week; Friday afternoon works if you can protect it. Choose the slot you can repeat. Consistency beats the perfect hour.

Don't reconstruct the lost week. Do a 10-minute return:

1. Mark last week's Top 3 done, partial or not started.
2. Write one sentence of reflection.
3. Set next week's Top 3.

Goals & Progress makes the point well: "A weekly review done 40 out of 52 weeks is far more valuable than a perfect streak that ends at week six." A missed review is not a reason to abandon the deck, any more than a missed day is. More on that: why people quit after a broken streak.

Barry Zimmerman's model of self-regulated learning describes a loop of forethought, performance and self-reflection; the weekly review is the reflection phase that feeds the next round of planning. Donald Schön called this "reflection-on-action": looking back with enough distance to see causes, not just symptoms (both via Goals & Progress). In practice it means asking why after every what. What got done is a data point. Why it got done, or didn't, is what changes next week's Top 3.

You can run everything above on paper. If you run it on a daily execution deck, here is what is already there.

The score is free. Foundations, the free-forever plan, includes "your Today list, streak and score, uncapped, plus cloud sync and unlimited Mastermind pods" (FAQ). The Assess step works without paying for anything, and you can try the deck without an account.

Pro keeps the longer memory. Pro ($7/month or $60/year, 7-day free trial, 30-day money-back; FAQ, refunds) adds "weekly review with year-view history". The plans page lists it as "Weekly Review ritual + full Year-view history & analytics" (plans). That's for people who want to see whether weeks are compounding across months. The ritual on this page doesn't depend on it.

If you want the "publicly reported" part. Mastermind pod members see "your display name, current streak, today's completion count, and the last seven days' scores", not your non-negotiables or notes (privacy). That's enough for a peer to notice a quiet week. A public share link to the same summary is off unless you turn on Sharing. More: accountability pods without a public feed.

Take this week's score and Top 3, mark each one done, partial or not started, and write one sentence on why. Then set next week's three.

Open a deck (Foundations is free forever, no account needed to try), or read the FAQ if you want year-view history on Pro.