Weekly Review & Battle Plan
This prompt runs your weekly review like a sharp chief of staff: you dump in what happened this week, and it pulls out wins, lessons, and open loops — then builds next week's prioritized battle plan. Twenty minutes, once a week, total clarity.
A guided weekly review that turns last week's chaos into next week's three priorities.
Act as my strategic weekly review coach. Ask me these questions one at a time, waiting for my answer before moving on: 1) What were your 3 biggest wins this week? 2) What drained your energy or felt like wasted time? 3) What did you avoid that you knew you should do? 4) What are your top 3 priorities for next week? After I answer all four, produce: a one-paragraph honest assessment of my week, my 3 priorities rewritten as specific outcomes with first actions, and one habit to protect my energy next week. Be encouraging but direct — no fluff.
See what this prompt creates
What this prompt does
The weekly review is the highest-leverage habit in personal productivity (it's the engine of GTD), and also the one everyone skips because staring at a blank page is hard. This prompt removes the blank page: it interviews you about your week, extracts patterns you'd miss, and converts the mess into next week's plan with real priorities instead of a wish list.
How to get the best result
Do it Friday afternoon or Sunday evening, and be honest in your brain dump — the prompt can only work with what you give it. Include numbers where you have them (revenue, workouts, deep-work hours); vague input gives vague plans. Answer its follow-up questions instead of rushing — the second round of answers is usually where the insights live.
Common mistakes to avoid
The classic failure is turning the battle plan into 47 tasks. If next week's plan has more than 3 big priorities, you don't have priorities — push back and make the prompt rank them ruthlessly. Also: actually schedule the review. A great prompt you never run is just a bookmark.
Try these variations
Run a monthly version by feeding it four weekly reviews and asking for bigger patterns — quarterly goals emerge naturally. Pair it with the decision matrix analyst prompt when the review surfaces a hard call you've been avoiding, or explore the productivity prompts collection.
How to use this prompt
- Copy it — hit the copy button above to grab the raw prompt text.
- Fill the brackets — replace anything in [BRACKETS] with your own details.
- Paste into your AI tool — works with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini for text prompts; Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion for image prompts; Runway, Pika or Sora for video.
- Iterate — tweak one bracket at a time until the output is exactly right.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a weekly review with this prompt take?
About 20 minutes: 10 for your brain dump, 10 answering its follow-ups and reviewing the plan. That's the point — it compresses an hour of unstructured reflection into a focused session you'll actually repeat.
I've never done a weekly review. Will this still work?
It's ideal for beginners because it teaches the habit as you go — it asks the right questions (wins, lessons, open loops, priorities) so you learn the GTD-style review structure by doing it, not by reading about it.
Can it connect my weekly plans to bigger goals?
Yes — paste your quarterly or yearly goals in the first run and it will reference them every week, flagging when your weekly tasks drift from what you said matters. That alignment check is the feature most people end up valuing most.
What if my week was a disaster with nothing completed?
Even better use case. The prompt is designed to extract lessons from bad weeks without judgment — it finds what derailed you and builds safeguards into next week's plan instead of just rolling the same tasks forward.
