A weekly review is the difference between a notes app and a memory you trust — and it only has to take ten minutes. Done in Thoughts, it has three movements: file what you captured, resurface what matters, and leave next week a starting note. With ChatGPT or Claude connected, the middle movement gets help: your assistant can summarise what changed across synced projects while you make the decisions. This guide gives you the ritual step by step, with the exact questions to ask and the parts to keep stubbornly manual.
Why reviews fail (and how this one avoids it)
Reviews fail by ambition: an hour-long ceremony with twelve steps survives two Sundays. They also fail by vagueness — “review my notes” with no sequence becomes a scroll. The ritual below is short because capture did the work during the week (voice-first, filed by suggestion), and sequenced because each step has one job. Attach it to an existing hinge — Sunday coffee, Friday shutdown — and protect the ten minutes like a meeting with someone you respect.
Minutes 0–3: Empty Unfiled
Open Thoughts and work the inbox top to bottom. For each unfiled thought: accept or fix its project, sharpen the title if you would not search for those words, delete what daylight has made worthless. Three outcomes only — filed, deleted, or (rarely) left for one more week with a better title. This is manual on purpose: filing is a values decision about your own life, and it is fast because the suggestions did the first pass. The philosophy is organising by project at weekly scale.
Minutes 3–7: Resurface — let the AI read the week back to you
Now open whichever assistant you have connected (setup for ChatGPT · setup for Claude) and ask, in order:
What has changed in my synced projects in the last seven days? Group by project, newest first within each.
From those, flag anything that sounds like a commitment, a deadline, or waiting on someone else. Quote the line for each.
What did other people add or last edit this week?
Read the answers against your memory. The assistant is reading latest visible states in the window — a catch-up feed, not an audit log — and only synced, unlocked content, which is exactly the right scope for a review of active work. Private local projects you review yourself, in the app, in the same three minutes if they need it. The question craft here — name projects, demand quotes, separate added from edited — comes from asking AI about your notes.
One more question earns its keep monthly:
Search my thoughts for “maybe”, “someday” and “revisit” from the last month. Which of these still deserve energy?
Literal search makes this honest: it finds the maybes you actually wrote, not themes an algorithm imagines.
Minutes 7–9: Move commitments out of notes
Anything with a date or a promise leaves the notes app now: reminder, calendar entry, message sent. Notes are for remembering; commitments need alarms. This single discipline is what stops a trusted memory becoming a guilt archive — captured is not the same as scheduled, and the review is where that distinction gets enforced weekly.
Minutes 9–10: Leave next week a starting note
Save a thought in the relevant project: “Week of [date] — carrying forward”, with the three things that matter most and the one open question.
Ask the assistant to draft it from your conversation and save it, or capture it yourself by voice in Thoughts. Either way, next week's review opens with last week's intentions in view — and your assistant can read that thought first, which makes the whole ritual compound. This save-back move is the heartbeat of the notepad-for-AI pattern.
What to keep out of the AI's hands
Filing, deleting, committing and prioritising stay yours — by your choice and by the connector's design, since it cannot edit or delete anything. The assistant summarises; you judge. If a summary and your memory disagree, trust the thought text: ask for a full read and the quoted line. And keep the ritual at ten minutes even when it goes well; the week it becomes an hour is the week before it stops.
The Sunday test
After three weeks of this, run the test that matters: pick something you captured in week one and find it by searching the words you would naturally use now. If it surfaces, your capture, filing and titling are working as a system — the quiet machinery behind a second brain on iPhone. If it does not, fix that thought's title, and let the repair teach the habit. Ten minutes, weekly, is all the maintenance a memory should need.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a weekly notes review take?
About ten minutes: three to empty Unfiled in Thoughts, four to have your assistant summarise the week's changes across synced projects and flag commitments, two to move dated commitments into reminders or a calendar, and one to leave next week a starting note.
What should I ask ChatGPT or Claude during a weekly review?
Ask what changed in your synced projects in the last seven days grouped by project, which items sound like commitments or deadlines with the line quoted, and what other people added or last edited. Monthly, search your own maybe and someday thoughts to decide what still deserves energy.
Can the assistant do the whole review for me?
No, and it should not. The connector cannot file, edit or delete your thoughts. It summarises and resurfaces; filing, deleting, scheduling and prioritising remain your decisions in the app.
What about notes in local-only projects?
They are invisible to assistants by design, so review them yourself in Thoughts during the same session. The per-project sync split means private material gets a manual review while active synced work gets AI assistance.