Run a full weekly review and finish with a plan for the coming week.
Open your calendar now and create a recurring event for your weekly review: 45 to 60 minutes, at the same time every week. The weekly review is a once-a-week session where you check and update every part of the system you've built during the course, so it keeps working after the course ends. Book the slot before you do anything else in this session. Once the time is on your calendar, the review has somewhere to happen.
This session ties the whole course together. In one sitting you check and update your priorities, your task system, your weekly and daily planning, your focus blocks, your quieter devices, your if-then plans for stuck tasks and your energy map. You'll use the checklist you wrote in Lesson 8.2, "The weekly review that holds everything together".
Choose a time you can protect most weeks. If Friday at 4pm (an invented example) keeps getting taken by late calls or end-of-week requests, try Friday at 2pm, or Monday at 8am before the team is online (also invented examples). Treat the review like a meeting with someone important. If something has to move it, move it to another time in the same week. Don't skip it. Lesson 8.2 showed that skipping the review is how a system starts to drift.
For this first run, find a slot in the next few days and start the recurring series from there. Expect the first review to take longer than later ones, because there is more to clean up.
Do the review somewhere you won't be interrupted, with your phone in focus mode, and go through the checklist in order. It has three phases.
Get clear is the phase for gathering loose items and emptying your inboxes. Collect everything loose into your inboxes: papers, receipts, notes from the week, voice memos. Process every inbox to empty using the clarify questions from Lesson 2.2. Then do a mind sweep, which means capturing anything you're still holding in your head.
Get current is the phase for checking the calendar and updating every list. Look at last week's calendar for follow-ups, and at the next two weeks for anything you need to prepare. Then go through each list in turn: next actions, projects, waiting-for and someday. On every list the same rules apply. Tick off what's done, delete what's dead, rewrite anything vague as a next action, and make sure every project has at least one next action. Don't rush the lists on the first run. If you haven't reviewed your system since Lesson 2.4, there may be a lot to clear.
Get creative is the last phase. Move anything on your someday list that is now ready into projects, and check that your three priorities are still the right three.
Priya ran their first full review on a Friday at 3pm, and it took 70 minutes. That is longer than the 45 to 60 minute guideline, which is normal for a first review. Get clear produced 23 items, including four promises from meetings that Priya had not captured anywhere. Get current found three projects with no next action and two waiting-for items that needed chasing. In Get creative, Priya moved one someday item, a short course on data visualisation, into projects for next month.
Put last week's plan beside what actually happened: its outcomes and its time blocks. If you wrote a five-line comparison in Lesson 3.4, "Plan next week from start to finish", reuse that pattern. Answer three questions in a few lines each: what got done, what slipped, and why.
Common reasons for slippage are an estimate that was too optimistic, an interruption you could have prevented, a priority that changed, or energy that ran out. Be specific about the why. "Busy week" gives you nothing to work with. A specific cause, such as two Wednesday blocks lost to a client escalation that came through chat, is something you can act on.
Priya had finished two of their three outcomes: the brief and the report data. The course modules slipped. They had planned both modules for Thursday evening and then worked late that night.
Choose two to four outcomes for the coming week, each linked to your priorities, and put them into time blocks first. After that, add meetings, message blocks, breaks, a buffer each day and your evening cut-off. Use your energy map to put deep work in your best windows.
Then choose exactly one change to your system, based on what the review showed. Only one. It might be a new if-then plan, a different focus slot, a filter for an email that keeps landing in your inbox, or a rule about which chats stay unmuted. Write the change down, and add it to next week's plan if it needs a time.
Priya's one change was to move the course to Saturday morning, 9 to 10.30, with this if-then plan: "If it's Saturday and I've had breakfast, then I'll open module 3 before anything else." Their plan for next week had three outcomes, blocked into their 10am to noon window on four days, with a buffer from 3.30 to 4.30 every day.
Finish by writing a three-line note: what got done, what slipped and why, and the one change. A finished review leaves you with:
every list current a recurring review slot on your calendar a time-blocked plan for next week with its outcomes at the top the three-line note
The test is whether you can look at your system afterwards and trust that everything you've agreed to do is in it.
Book the slot now. When you've finished the review, save the plan and the note where you'll find them next Friday, because that is where the next review starts.
Go through your review using your checklist. Then save next week's time-blocked plan and write three lines on what you will change.
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