A weekly review that starts from what actually happened
A weekly review template usually starts with this week’s goals, then how much you finished, and finally what you plan to do next week. By the time you fill in the second half, the page is mostly things you still want to do, with only a few lines about what already happened this week. Hina can pull the seven days of records first, so you can see which projects the time went to and which things left a result, then compare that list with your own plan. What you keep on paper is what actually happened this week, and the gap between that and the plan.
The goals column tends to hold only wishes
Fixes already merged, copy already sent, and emails already answered are easy to skip while you write.
By the second half of the page, what remains is often sentences about things you still want to do, such as finishing the write-up or getting the release process in order. Which repositories you opened this week, and which apps took up your time, rarely get written down. Wishes can wait until the step where you compare them with the plan. First write down the projects you touched in these seven days.
Pull seven days of material first
In Hina, a week starts on Monday, and a day runs from 4 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next day. Work that runs late on Sunday night stays on Sunday. It is not counted as Monday just because midnight has passed. To look at this week, open Hina’s Week view. You can see which projects the time went to and how each day was split by kind of activity, instead of being left with only a sense that the week was busy. In a terminal, you can also run Hina’s command line with --weekly plus this week’s end date, and pull all seven days at once.
Window titles and page paths are recorded only if you turn on Record window titles and page paths on the Privacy tab of Settings. If they are off, Week view still shows duration and the Daily mix, but projects found from titles go missing and you cannot see which document was open. With a document title, a page path, or a repository name, it is usually easier to match what you did that day than to start from the app with the longest duration and guess.
What you asked AI has to be turned on separately, and it is off by default. Once it is on, it can help you remember what you were about to do. Whether you finished still has to be checked separately.
Compare the plan and keep the gap
Once the material is spread out, open your own plan. It might be three lines you wrote in a note on Monday, or this week’s items on a to-do list. Where they match, write one sentence about the result, for example that the export format is already changed and the repository has a matching commit, or that the help docs only had the table of contents changed and have not been published to the site. Where they do not match, you can split them into two columns. One is what the plan includes but this week’s records almost never show. The other is what took time in the records but is not named in the plan.
Suppose the plan says to tidy the release notes. If this week’s Trail has almost no matching document or project, you may not have done it, or you may have done it without a document title left in the record. You can first mark that mismatch as still to check, and leave the gap in the review. The other way around, a repository may have taken a fair amount of time even though the plan never names it. That was usually something added partway through. Add one sentence in the review, so next week you know what actually occupied this week.
Leave lines next week can continue from
How to compare two weeks, and why a half day and a full day cannot be compared directly, is written in “Comparing workweeks fairly.” This article only covers how to write this week as a review. The ending can be very short. Pick two or three named things from this week’s records, and write one next step for each. For example, the update notes have already been revised, and next Monday you will check the table of contents against one real release note. Anything you have not checked stays unchecked.
Writing, discussion, and thinking leave no commit. You can still include them in the review if you actually did them this week, such as a post revised to a third draft, or a title just agreed in a meeting.