Weekly Review

The weekly review is the practice that holds the rest of any productivity system together. The view Pensum gives you is opinionated: five fixed zones, in priority order, with bulk actions on each. The whole thing is meant to take ten or fifteen minutes — not a Saturday afternoon.

Opening it

Run Pensum: Open weekly review from the command palette, or click the Weekly review nudge on the Pensum Home view (which shows up automatically when it’s been seven days or more since your last review).

The five zones

#	Zone	What’s in it	What you do
1	Inbox sweep	Open tasks in your configured inbox files	Triage, delete, or assign to projects. Goal: empty inbox.
2	Overdue	Tasks with a due date in the past	Reschedule, complete, or admit it’s not happening and delete.
3	Waiting	Tasks in [w] status	Chase the blocker, mark active if it cleared, or close the loop if it died.
4	Stalled projects	Projects with open work but no completed task in the last 14 days (or never)	Decide: pick the next concrete action, archive the project, or commit to a date.
5	Wins since last review	Tasks completed since the last review (default 7 days)	Read, feel good, optional.

The order is intentional. Inbox first because clearing it changes how you see everything else. Overdue second because nothing else matters if last week is still leaking. Waiting and Stalled are where most weeks’ decisions actually live. Wins last because positive reinforcement matters and most reviews skip it.

Working through the digest

Each section is a list of tasks (or projects, for zone 4) with the same interactions you have everywhere else in Pensum:

• Click a task to edit
• Right-click for quick actions
• Vim keys to navigate without leaving the keyboard (j/k to move, c to complete, r to reschedule, d to defer)
• Multi-select with v then bulk-complete / bulk-defer / bulk-delete the whole batch (see Bulk operations)

A typical review looks like:

1. Inbox: j through items; c to complete the trivial ones; right-click → Move to Project on the rest. Total time: 3-4 minutes.
2. Overdue: j through; r → “+1 week” on anything still real; delete or x on the rest. Total time: 2-3 minutes.
3. Waiting: j through; for each one that’s clearly stale, right-click → Mark as active (you’re going to chase it) or delete (you’re done waiting). Total time: 1-2 minutes.
4. Stalled projects: read each line. Pick one — either add a task that’s the genuine next action, or mark the project archived. Total time: 4-5 minutes.
5. Wins: read. Total time: 1 minute.

Stalled-project detection

A project is “stalled” when:

• It has at least one open task ([ ] or [/]), AND
• Either it has zero completed tasks ever, OR its most recently completed task has a done-date ≥ 14 days ago

The 14-day window is non-configurable in v1.0 — it’s a rough proxy for “this project hasn’t shown forward motion in two weeks.” If the project genuinely doesn’t need motion (waiting on external timeline, paused on purpose), set its frontmatter status: paused or status: planned and it’ll continue showing tasks in normal views without flagging as stalled.

Marking the review complete

At the bottom of the view, Mark weekly review complete writes today’s date into settings.lastWeeklyReview. This:

• Resets the “do a review” nudge on the Pensum Home view for another seven days
• Anchors the next review’s “wins since” window so you get a clean delta

You don’t have to click the button to have done a review — Pensum doesn’t track whether you actually changed anything — but the nudge will keep showing up until you do.

When to do it

Most people land on either Friday afternoon (close out the week clean) or Monday morning (decide the week ahead). Both work. The Home view nudge appears when it’s been seven days or more since the last marked review, so you’ll get a prompt regardless.

In the CLI / MCP

The same five-zone digest is available to agents via plan.weekly_review:

pensum plan weekly-review --json

Returns JSON with the same five zones. Useful for a Monday-morning agent ritual that pre-digests the review for you and posts the summary to a channel of your choice.

See MCP server for the tool shape.