Once a week
The weekly check-in
A week is short enough to remember honestly and long enough for something to have changed. That is why the weekly check-in is the review that tends to survive when the daily one lapses and the quarterly one never arrives.
What it asks
The week you just had, and the one in front of you.
- How the week went as a whole, not day by day
- What moved on the things you said mattered
- What the week in front of you is for
The right unit for noticing a pattern
A day is too short to show a pattern: one bad Tuesday is weather. A quarter is long enough that you are reconstructing it rather than remembering it, which is why quarterly reviews so often turn into writing a story that flatters the decisions already made.
A week sits in between. You can still remember Monday on Friday, and anything that happened three times in it was a pattern rather than an accident.
It is also the unit most work already runs on, so a weekly review does not ask you to adopt a new calendar. It attaches to one you are already keeping.
How Crystal asks it
Inside the product.
- Five minutes, and it arrives already knowing your week from the daily answers.
- Your goals come up here, one at a time, with the only question that matters: did you work on it.
- It rolls up into the monthly check-in, which is why that one can talk about trends rather than events.