---
title: The Weekly Review
description: Sunday evening in two steps — an automated "get current" pass that cleans state, then a ten-section review brief designed to be acted on in under fifteen minutes.
track: rituals
url: https://www.chiefofstaff.io/guides/the-weekly-review
published: 2026-09-01
author: chiefofstaff.io editorial system
outcome: run an automated get-current pass, then produce a ten-section weekly review whose every section asks for a disposition, with FYIs in an appendix.
prerequisites: the-daily-brief
source: chiefofstaff.io
---

# The Weekly Review

Sunday evening in two steps — an automated "get current" pass that cleans state, then a ten-section review brief designed to be acted on in under fifteen minutes.

## Why Weekly Is the Engine

The daily brief is the surface; the weekly review is where the system's *health* gets maintained. Delegations age, projects stall, someday items rot, ventures go quiet — none of it shows up in a daily message capped at 4,000 characters, and none of it should. Once a week, all of it gets one honest pass. Skipped weeklies are the clearest signal the system is breaking; the cadence file calls them "an anchor that doesn't move."

![Sunday: an automated Get Current pass at 18:45 drains the inbox, ages the waiting list and flags stale work; the review brief at 19:00 has ten fixed sections.](/img/diagrams/weekly-review.svg)

## Step One: Get Current (Automated, No Input from You)

Fifteen minutes before the review lands, a headless session runs the housekeeping pass — triage only, no brief, no messages:

1. **Drain the inbox.** Every capture becomes a task, a note, or a question; processed items move to a dated archive folder.
2. **Age the waiting list.** Any `waiting` task whose follow-up date has passed is bumped and noted; anything older than fourteen days without a follow-up date is flagged.
3. **Flag stalled projects.** Every active project note with no movement in seven days and no `waiting` reason.
4. **Flag stale ventures.** Every active venture whose hub note has not been touched in seven days. (Activity keys off file edits, not task churn.)
5. **Flag aging someday items.** Anything older than ninety days gets a delete-prompt.
6. **Check the guides feed** for new material worth surfacing. See [Watching for new guides](/guides/watching-for-new-guides).

The output is a flagged-items file the review consumes. This is the housekeeping layer, kept strictly separate from the briefing layer — see [What a chief-of-staff system is](/guides/what-a-chief-of-staff-system-is) on why the three layers are never collapsed.

## Step Two: The Review Brief

Ten sections in this exact order, GTD-aligned, designed to be **acted on** rather than read:

| # | Section | What you do with it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | **Inbox state** — processed, dropped, still unprocessed | decide the leftovers |
| 2 | **Previous calendar** — past seven days' events needing follow-up | confirm or dismiss each candidate |
| 3 | **Upcoming calendar** — next fourteen days; prep gaps; conflicts | assign prep tasks |
| 4 | **Waiting-for**, sorted by age | follow up, escalate, or close |
| 5 | **Project list** — every project, flagged: no next action / no movement / outcome achieved | unstick, park, or close |
| 6 | **Next-actions scan** — tasks by venture; orphans, mis-filed, blocked | re-label, re-prioritise |
| 7 | **Someday / maybe** — items aging out | keep, promote, or delete |
| 8 | **Areas of focus** — ventures untouched this week; ventures to add or archive | say so |
| 9 | **Portfolio state** — one paragraph per venture: status, blockers, numbers, next bet | correct the picture |
| 10 | **Next week's priorities** — three to five, proposed | confirm or edit |
| — | *Appendix:* **the FYI digest** — everything interesting that didn't demand a response | skim, or don't |

On Monday at 07:00 a short priority-alignment note restates the three to five priorities; you reply only if misaligned. If Sunday's review produced no decisions, Monday's brief opens with: *"Weekly review didn't complete — N items need a decision."*

## Where It Happens

The weekly is too long for a phone. The push still goes to the channel — as a short thread rather than a file, because a raw document rendered badly on first attempt — but the *dispositioning* happens on the laptop, in the review surface, where every task reference is clickable and the stale buckets can be walked one item at a time. See [The review surface](/guides/the-review-surface).

## Above the Weekly

Monthly: a portfolio pack (one page per venture: wins, issues, one decision needed, next month's rock), a read-through of the decision journal, and a read-through of the feedback log looking for lessons to promote. Quarterly: a rock review per venture, a role-charter review (is the chief of staff working on the right things? edit the identity file), an archive sweep, and a tool audit — anything unused for thirty days is removed. Annually: re-read every decision record. Daily plus weekly is the engine; the rest is maintenance.

## The Rule That Keeps It Honest

Every section either produces a disposition or is empty. A weekly review that is *read* and produces nothing has become a newspaper — the same anti-pattern as the daily, at a larger scale. When that starts happening, the fix is usually to shrink the review, not to make it more interesting.

## See it

The [demo vault](/demo/scenarios/the-weekly-review) has two weekly reviews, including the three weeks one step could not reach its feed. It is fictional, and it was built by Claude Code sessions running [the bootstrap prompt](/start#prompt) — not written by hand.