Todoist weekly review: automate it with your diary
Friday afternoon. You open your Todoist “Weekly Review” project, check the first recurring task (“Review completed tasks for the past week”), and then you stall. You click into Activity Log. You scroll. You recognize some task names, but the context is gone. Which day was the quarterly report? Was the dentist appointment before or after the product meeting? You completed 47 tasks this week, and the list reads like a receipt from a store you cannot remember visiting.
The weekly review was supposed to give you clarity. Instead, you are spending the first twenty minutes trying to reconstruct the raw material the review needs to work with.
This is not a Todoist problem. It is a memory problem that Todoist was never designed to solve.
What a weekly review actually requires
David Allen’s Getting Things Done framework breaks the weekly review into three phases: Get Clear (process loose ends), Get Current (update all lists), and Get Creative (generate new ideas). Todoist’s own weekly review guide recommends an hour for the full ritual, including a reflection section where you assess what went right and what went wrong.
But reflection presumes recall. Before you can evaluate whether your week aligned with your goals, you need to know what your week contained. Not just the tasks you checked off, but the meetings you sat through, the conversations that shifted your priorities, the afternoon you lost to an unexpected production incident.
Todoist’s completed-tasks list gives you one dimension of the week: what you decided to do and actually finished. It does not tell you what happened between those completions. It does not tell you that the three tasks you finished on Wednesday were all squeezed into a single hour between back-to-back calls. It does not tell you that Thursday felt unproductive despite five checkmarks because all five were shallow administrative items you had been postponing.
A weekly review that only has checkmarks to work with is like writing a movie review from the scene list alone. The plot points are there. The experience is not.
The reconstruction tax
Most people who practice weekly reviews know this gap. They fill it with workarounds.
Some keep a separate journal or running note throughout the week, jotting down context as it happens. Others flip through their calendar to reconstruct the timeline. A few scroll through Slack history to piece together what they discussed and with whom.
All of these work, and all of them cost time. The running-note approach requires discipline every single day. The calendar-plus-Slack approach burns fifteen to twenty minutes at the start of every review session just to build a picture of the week that should already exist.
Call this the reconstruction tax: the time and effort you spend at the beginning of every weekly review just gathering the facts. It is invisible in most productivity advice because the advice assumes you already know what happened. “Review your completed tasks.” “Reflect on what went well.” “Assess progress toward your goals.” These steps are useful, but they skip the step that makes them possible.
A diary as pre-filled context
deariary generates a diary entry every day from the tools you already use: Todoist, Google Calendar, Slack, GitHub, and others. Each entry is a short, readable summary of the day. Not a list of data points, but a paragraph or two describing what you did, in what order, across which contexts.
When Friday comes and you sit down for your weekly review, you do not need to reconstruct anything. You read five diary entries. Each one takes about thirty seconds. In two and a half minutes, you have the full shape of your week: what you worked on, what interrupted you, when you shifted between projects, and which days felt different from the rest.
The review itself becomes the entire session, not just the part that starts after you have finished remembering.
What the diary surfaces that Todoist alone does not
Todoist records completions. The diary records the day around those completions. Here is what the combination reveals during a weekly review:
Completion context
A task named “Write project proposal” could mean a focused three-hour block or a fragmented effort spread across five interrupted windows. The diary captures both the task and the circumstances. When your review asks “What went well this week?”, you can point to specific days where the conditions were right for deep work, not just days where the task count was high.
The gap between planned and lived
Todoist shows what you planned and what you finished. The diary shows what you actually spent your time doing. Some weeks, the gap is small: your plan matched your reality. Other weeks, the gap is large because unplanned meetings, urgent requests, or a shifting priority list consumed the day. The diary makes that gap visible without you having to piece it together.
Cross-tool patterns
If you connect multiple integrations, the diary weaves together signals that no single app tracks. A Wednesday where you had four meetings (Calendar), completed zero tasks (Todoist), but had 23 Slack threads (Slack) tells a very different story from a Wednesday where you had no meetings, completed eight tasks, and sent two messages. Both Wednesdays look identical in Todoist (zero vs. eight tasks). In the diary, the difference is obvious.
Energy and rhythm across the week
Reading five daily entries in sequence shows you the rhythm of your week in a way that a single aggregated report cannot. You notice that Monday and Tuesday were productive, Wednesday was derailed, Thursday was recovery, and Friday was administrative cleanup. That pattern is invisible in a task count summary. It becomes clear in five paragraphs.
Fitting the diary into your existing review workflow
deariary does not replace your weekly review. It replaces the reconstruction step that precedes it. Here is one way to fold it into an existing Todoist-based review:
Before (without diary):
- Open Activity Log. Scroll through completed tasks. Try to remember context. (15-20 min)
- Flip through Google Calendar for meetings. (5 min)
- Check Slack for key conversations. (5-10 min)
- Reflect on the week. Evaluate progress. (15-20 min)
- Plan next week. (10-15 min)
Total: 50-70 minutes, with nearly half spent on reconstruction.
After (with diary):
- Read this week’s five diary entries in deariary. (3 min)
- Reflect on the week. Evaluate progress. (15-20 min)
- Plan next week. (10-15 min)
Total: 28-38 minutes. The reflection and planning time stays the same. The reconstruction time drops to almost nothing.
The diary does not make your review shorter by cutting corners. It makes it shorter by removing the overhead that was never part of the review in the first place.
What the diary does not do
deariary does not tell you whether your week was good or bad. It does not evaluate your progress toward goals. It does not recommend what to do next. These are judgment calls that belong to you, and they are the reason the weekly review exists.
The diary is a record, not an assessment. It gives you the raw material so that your reflection time is spent reflecting, not reconstructing. The difference matters because reconstruction is tedious and reflection is valuable. One drains your Friday energy. The other refills your Monday clarity.
A note on Todoist pricing and deariary
Todoist offers three plans: Beginner (free), Pro, and Business. The weekly review workflow works with any Todoist plan because deariary reads only completed tasks through Todoist’s API, which is available on all tiers.
On deariary’s side, the Free plan lets you connect one integration. If Todoist is your only productivity tool, that is enough to get daily diary entries based on your completed tasks. To combine Todoist with Google Calendar, Slack, or other tools (which is where the weekly review context becomes richest), the Basic plan supports up to five integrations.
Starting the loop
The weekly review is one of the most effective productivity practices that exists. Todoist is one of the best tools for running it. But the practice has always assumed that you already know what happened during the week, and that assumption has always been quietly wrong.
deariary fills in the part that was missing: a daily, automatic, readable record of what your week actually contained. Not so the diary can replace your review, but so your review can start where it was always supposed to start.
Your next Friday review does not need to begin with scrolling. It can begin with reading.
