Four questions, no dashboard. The review is for changing your mind, not for proving the week was full. A full week is easy to prove. The calendar will do it for you. A changed mind needs a prompt that does not turn into a second reporting ritual. I have watched reviews grow until they are the work. Then nothing else gets examined, because the examination ate Thursday.
Short means you can finish it when you are tired. If the review requires a fresh energy, it will be skipped in the weeks that most need it. Those are the crowded weeks. A review that only happens on quiet Fridays flatters your calm self and abandons your busy one. The busy one makes more of the decisions.
The review is for changing your mind, not for proving the week was full.
The four questions
What did I believe on Monday that I do not believe now? If the answer is nothing, say nothing. Do not invent a lesson to fill the box. An honest blank is information. It means the week was activity, and the next week needs a slot for thinking, not a richer template.
What did a customer say that I am tempted to treat as the whole market? This is the availability check from biases worth studying first. Write the quote. Then write how many other conversations disagreed or stayed silent. One vivid sentence should not set the roadmap by itself. It can set a question. Questions are cheaper than pivots.
What did we ship or say that we should stop? Stopping is the least reported act in marketing and one of the most useful. A sentence, a channel, a meeting, a metric. Name one. If you cannot name one, you are accumulating. Accumulation feels like building a system. Often it is fear of the small loss of killing your own work.
What decision next week depends on this note? If none, the note is a diary. Diaries are allowed. They are not this review. The point of writing it down is that Monday can see it. A review that does not touch a decision is a performance of reflection. I have performed it. The tell is that the following week looks like the previous one, with a new paragraph in a doc nobody opens.
| Question | A strong answer | A fake answer |
|---|---|---|
| What belief moved? | A specific claim died or got narrower | "We learned a lot" |
| What am I over-reading? | A quote, plus how untypical it might be | "Customers want this" from one call |
| What should stop? | A named sentence, channel, or meeting | "We'll optimize" |
| What decision uses this? | A choice with a date | "Keep an eye on it" |
No dashboard
A dashboard in the review changes the meeting into a reading of numbers. Numbers matter when a decision is attached. Without a decision, the numbers become a liturgy. Everyone nods at the chart. Nobody kills the sentence. I would rather bring one number I am willing to act on than twelve I am willing to narrate.
If a metric belongs, it belongs as a servant of a question already on the list. "The refusing line lost the first screen and kept the later reading" is a number pair tied to a belief. It can sit under question one. It should not open the review, or the review will become a debate about the number and never reach the belief. Order is the design. Belief first. Evidence second. Stop third. Next decision fourth.
This is also a protection against tool theater. A new analytics view is not a better review. It is often a way to delay the sentence. The sentence can be written on paper. The notebook is a home for it, not a prerequisite. If you wait for the perfect place to review, you will review in the tool and call the configuration progress.
Who is in the room
I keep it small. A review with a crowd becomes a status update, because crowds reward performance. Two or three people who will hear "we should stop this" without translating it into a softer plan. If you need a larger group, send them the four sentences after. Do not make them watch you find the sentences. Watching creates pressure to produce a lesson, and produced lessons are usually recaps.
The person who did the work should be able to say what they no longer believe. If only the most senior voice answers, the review is an inspection, not a practice. Inspection has its place. It is not how a team learns to notice its own week. I want the habit in the people who will be in the hallway on Wednesday, where the insight otherwise dies.
Thirty minutes
Thirty minutes is enough for four questions if you do not demo software. Ten minutes is enough if the week was simple. When it runs long, something else has entered: a debate about taste, a re-plan of the quarter, a defense of a project. Those debates may be needed. They are not the review. Park them. Finish the four lines. The parked debate will be better once the lines exist, because you will know which belief is actually in play.
I write the lines where a later note can link to them. A review that cannot be linked will be retold from memory, and memory will smooth it. Make it inspectable applies to your own week. A date, four sentences, a decision. That is a path. Next month you can see whether the decision happened or whether the review was theater.
Short is the feature. The moment the review needs a pre-read, it has joined the pile of work it was meant to examine. Keep it rude and small. Change your mind, or admit you did not. Then go back to the job.
When the four lines feel too small
They feel too small in a week that had a launch, a conflict, and a number everyone wants to discuss. The smallness is the design. The launch can have its own note. The conflict can have a decision written as choice, refusal, and what would change it. The number can sit under the belief it actually touches. If you stretch the review until all of that fits, you have rebuilt the status meeting and given it a thoughtful name. Names do not shrink meetings. A hard stop does.
I keep a scratch line beside the four questions for anything that is screaming to be included and is not one of them. The scratch line does not get read aloud. If it still matters on Monday, it becomes its own decision or it dies. Most screams die. They were the week's adrenaline, not its lesson. Adrenaline writes long reviews. The short review is what is left when the adrenaline has had a night to cool.
A second pressure is the desire to look prepared. A prepared review has charts, a narrative arc, and a recommendation that was decided before the questions were asked. That is a presentation. Present it somewhere else if you must. In this slot, unreadiness is a signal that the week has not been digested, and digestion is the work. Showing up with blank answers is more useful than showing up with a memo that pre-answers them. The memo cannot be surprised. The point of four questions is that one of them might surprise you. If none can, you have already decided what the week meant, and the review is theater with better manners.
Over a month, read the four sets together. You are looking for a belief that moved and then quietly moved back, which is the usual fate of an unwritten no. You are looking for a stop you named and did not do. The undone stop is the most expensive line in the pile, because it reveals the review as a wish. Wishes are allowed in a journal. They are a failed review. Next week's first question can be why the stop did not happen. That is still four lines. It does not require a new ritual. It requires you to believe the old lines when they are inconvenient.