Weekly Review Template: How to Audit Your Goals Every Sunday

Published: 2026-09-21 | Updated: 2026-09-28 | By GoalTracker Team

Daily tracking tells you if you showed up today. It doesn't tell you if the goal itself is still the right one, or if a subgoal has quietly stalled for two weeks. That's what a weekly review is for: a fixed 15-minute checkpoint, not daily maintenance.

Why weekly, not daily or monthly

Daily is too short a window to see a trend. One bad day looks the same as the start of a real problem. Monthly is too long: by the time you notice a subgoal has stalled, you've lost four weeks, not one. Weekly is the smallest window where a pattern is visible but the cost of catching it late is still small.

The idea is not new. David Allen's Getting Things Done method treats the weekly review as the habit that keeps the whole system trustworthy. The version here is narrower. It reviews goals, not every open task, so it fits in fifteen minutes.

The four questions worth asking every Sunday

Which subgoals moved this week, and which didn't? Not "did I work on it," but did the subgoal's actual completion state change.
Is any subgoal's due date now unrealistic? Better to move it deliberately on Sunday than to quietly miss it on the day.
Did any streak break, and why? A broken streak is data, not a failure. Look for the actual cause (travel, a bad week, the minimum was too high) before resetting.
Is this goal still the right goal? The only question a daily check-in never asks. Priorities shift; a weekly review is the checkpoint where you're allowed to notice.

The 15-minute template

Copy this into a note, or use the free weekly review template, which asks four short prompts and downloads your answers as Markdown or prints them.

Minutes	Step	What you write down
0-3	Scan every goal's progress	One line per goal: moved, stalled or done
3-6	Check due dates	Any date to move, and the new date
6-9	Look at the streak calendar	Days missed and the real reason
9-12	Question each goal	Keep, pause or drop, one word each
12-15	Pick next week's first steps	One microgoal per active goal you can do on Monday

The last step matters most. A review that ends with "work harder on the book" changes nothing. A review that ends with "Monday: outline chapter 3" gives the week a starting point.

A worked example

Say you track two goals: "Run a 10K in October" and "Learn conversational Spanish".

Progress. The 10K goal moved: "Run 5 km without stopping" is done. Spanish stalled: no subgoal changed for two weeks.
Due dates. "Finish the A1 course" is due Friday and is half done. Move it one week and write down why: two evenings lost to work.
Streak. The calendar shows three missed days, all Spanish-only days. The cause is clear: the daily minimum of "one full lesson" is too big for a work night. Change it to "ten minutes of flashcards".
Goal check. Both goals still matter. Nothing to drop.
Next steps. Monday: "Run 6 km". Tuesday: "10 minutes of flashcards".

That review took about ten minutes and fixed the real problem (a minimum that was too high) instead of just logging guilt about missed days.

Keep the review itself lightweight

A review process that takes an hour won't survive a busy week. The four questions above are deliberately answerable by scanning a goal tree, not journaling. That's why doing the review directly against your tracked goals and subgoals (rather than a separate notes doc) matters: the answers are already visible in the goal→subgoal→microgoal structure and the streak calendar, you're just looking at them with a different question in mind.

In GoalTracker Online, that structure is what a Sunday review scans through: each goal's progress bar shows how many subgoals are done, subgoals carry due dates (overdue ones are highlighted), microgoals show what has actually been completed, and the streak calendar shows which of the last 28 days had a finished subgoal. No separate review doc to maintain.

The review is also a good moment to back up. GoalTracker keeps your goals in your browser, so pressing Export once a week gives you a file you can restore from; see the local-first guide for the full routine.

Common mistakes

Reviewing only what went well. The stalled subgoal is the one the review exists for.
Changing everything at once. Change one thing per goal per week, so you can tell what worked.
Skipping the review after a bad week. A bad week is when the review is most useful and when it is most tempting to skip.

Make it a standing appointment

A review you "get to when you have time" doesn't happen. Put it on the calendar, same time every week, before the week's plan gets made. The review should inform next week, not follow it. When you plan that week, sort the tasks by urgency and importance first; Eisenhower matrix examples shows where everyday tasks usually land and why. If a goal keeps stalling week after week, it may be too big to act on; break it into subgoals before the next review.

Set up your goal tree today, and give Sunday's review something real to look at.