The Weekly Review Builder: Turn Last Week's Chaos Into This Week's Priority List
Why this prompt matters
Without a structured weekly review, most professionals default to a to-do list built from whatever feels most urgent that morning — meaning recurring low-value tasks quietly survive review after review while quarterly priorities slip. Teams that skip this step routinely discover at quarter-end that 30-40% of their time went to work that never should have made the cut, by which point the deadline pressure it created is much harder to walk back.
What we use it for
It's Monday morning, you have 15 minutes before your first meeting, and you have a messy calendar export plus a half-remembered sense of what mattered last week — you need an honest read on where your time actually went, not just a to-do list for the next five days.
Prompt
Act as an executive coach who specializes in weekly planning and priority-setting for [YOUR ROLE, e.g. "a mid-level product manager"]. CONTEXT: Here is what I actually did last week (tasks completed, meetings held, decisions made, things that came up unexpectedly): [PASTE YOUR ROUGH NOTES, CALENDAR EXPORT, OR TASK LIST FROM LAST WEEK] Here are my goals and commitments for this week: [LIST THIS WEEK'S GOALS, DEADLINES, AND KNOWN COMMITMENTS] My role's top 3 priorities for this quarter are: [LIST YOUR QUARTERLY OR OKR-LEVEL PRIORITIES] TASK: Produce a structured weekly review that does three things: 1. Score last week against my quarterly priorities — what I did that actually moved the needle vs. what consumed time without advancing anything that matters 2. Surface at least one blind spot: a task, meeting, or recurring pattern from last week that I likely didn't notice was working against my priorities 3. Convert this week's goals and commitments into a ranked priority list, accounting for what's genuinely urgent vs. what only feels urgent CONSTRAINTS: - Do not just restate what I did last week back to me — evaluate it against the stated priorities - Be direct about time that was wasted or misallocated, even if that means contradicting how productive the week felt - Rank this week's items using a clear method (e.g. impact vs. effort, or urgency vs. importance) and state the method used - Limit the output to what fits on one page — if there are more than 7 priority items, force a cut and explain what got deprioritized and why - Flag anything on this week's list that conflicts with or duplicates another item OUTPUT FORMAT: 1. **Last Week Scorecard** — 3-5 bullet points: what moved the needle, what didn't, one blind spot 2. **This Week's Ranked Priorities** — numbered list (max 7), each with a one-line reason for its rank 3. **Cut List** — anything deprioritized or removed, with a one-line reason 4. **One Question to Ask Yourself Friday** — a single forward-looking check to evaluate whether this week actually went well
Result
Example output — role: senior product manager, quarterly priority: ship the onboarding redesign, reduce support ticket volume, grow activation rate 10%
1. Last Week Scorecard
• Moved the needle: Finalized onboarding redesign spec and got design sign-off — this was the single highest-leverage task of the week and should have gotten more hours than it did.
• Did not move the needle: 4 hours across two "alignment syncs" about the Q3 roadmap that produced no decisions and duplicated a document already agreed on in June.
• Blind spot: You spent 6 hours this week responding to ad-hoc Slack questions from support about edge cases in the current (pre-redesign) onboarding flow — work that will become moot once the redesign ships, but is currently consuming a full day per week with no end date and no owner besides you.
2. This Week's Ranked Priorities
1. Review onboarding redesign build against the approved spec (impact: high, effort: medium — this is the direct path to your top quarterly priority)
2. Write a one-page onboarding FAQ for support to reduce the ad-hoc Slack load identified as a blind spot (impact: medium, effort: low — highest ROI item on this list)
3. Activation rate review with data team — confirm which of last quarter's experiments to carry forward (impact: high, effort: low)
4. Support ticket triage session — identify top 3 recurring issues the redesign should specifically address (impact: medium, effort: medium)
5. Draft onboarding redesign launch announcement (impact: medium, effort: low)
6. Roadmap alignment sync — ONLY if new information has emerged since June's agreed document (impact: low unless blocking, effort: high)
7. Backlog grooming (impact: low, effort: medium — candidate for delegation)
3. Cut List
• Removed: a second roadmap alignment sync scheduled for Thursday — duplicates Monday's item 6 and no new inputs justify two discussions in one week.
• Deprioritized: backlog grooming pushed to "if time allows" — none of this quarter's three priorities depend on it.
4. One Question to Ask Yourself Friday
"Did the redesign move closer to shipping because of decisions I made this week, or did it move despite how I spent my time?"
Most weekly reviews fail because they restate what happened instead of evaluating it. This prompt forces a judgment call: does last week's activity map to your stated quarterly priorities, or did time quietly leak into things that felt productive but didn't move anything that matters?
The blind-spot requirement is the key design choice — asking the model to surface at least one pattern you likely didn't notice yourself, rather than only summarizing what you already know. Ranking this week's list with a stated method (impact vs. effort, urgency vs. importance) and forcing a hard cap on item count also prevents the common failure mode of a 15-item to-do list where everything is technically a priority and nothing actually is.
Feed it your rough notes, not a polished summary — the messier the input, the more useful the model's read on where your time actually went.