Dear Reader,
We are in the middle of January, three weeks after the start date of the Worldwide Day of Goalsetting (New Year's Day for clarity). This is a time of year when many resolutions have been abandoned, and many hopes for a “new year, new me” are gone. While this is a common scenario, it doesn’t have to be that way…
Best, Patryk
Let’s start today’s post with a short quote by Scott Adams:
If you want to live a happy and successful life, focus on establishing a system that works, rather than setting goal after goal.
A few years ago, I started testing this approach in my life. I started small - I only set up one system to review my life weekly. I really enjoyed the process. I kept iterating and adding more components and systems. After a few years of experimenting, I can really admit, “It really works!” And, Dear Reader, thank you for joining my journey of describing and sharing those experiences.
Today, we’ll discuss the “Week Summary” - the very first system that began the whole journey and still plays a crucial role in my life management.
The idea of that system is very simple: I dedicate a small portion of my time to reviewing important parts of my life each week. In my case, it’s around two hours on Sunday morning - consistently from June 2022.1 It seems easy and straightforward, and it really is, and what’s important is the consequences are amazing!
Without further ado, let's see this process in detail.
🛕 The Process and The Template
Everything starts in my personal knowledge base.2
Each week, I create a new note and insert the following template:
Date{{date: YYYY-MM-DD}}
~ If you want to live a happy and successful life, focus on establishing a system that works, rather than setting goal after goal. ~ Scott Adams
---
📍 Place
- .
---
🛣️ Process
- [ ] Write down the most important events
- [ ] Review of last week notes
- [ ] Fill out Well-being section
- [ ] Review of [[🤗 Patryk's Social Tracker]]
- [ ] Review of Finances
- [ ] Planning for the next week
- [ ] Travel ([Travel Planning])
- [ ] Myself ([[🫶 Me]])
- [ ] Entry to [🔮 Our Love Story with]
🧹 House Keeping
- [ ] Review of mails
- [ ] Review of photos
- [ ] Review of Downloads
📋 Direction Check
- [ ] Review of week summaries from the previous weeks: What are the most important insights from the past few weeks? What should I focus in the upcoming weeks?
- [ ] Review and upadete of quarterly goals
---
⭐️ The most important events of the week
Personal
- .
Partner
- .
Relationships
- .
Career
- .
---
💆♂️ Well-being
🏃♂️ Physical Health:
🧠 Mental Health:
🧘 Meditation:
😁 Happiness:
☺️ Happiness scale
- 10 - (...)
- 1 - (...)
---
📗 The Most Important Notes
- .
✏️ Week Reflection
- .
💭 Free Thoughts
- .
📚 Reading List
- .
Then, I go through the template point by point, completing all the sections.
Done!
Actually, at this point, we could finish the post.
But if you are curious, stay with me, and let’s dive into the details.
My Week Summary starts with “⭐️ The most important events of the week.” This is a reflection part where I try to write down what happened throughout the week out of my head. Then, I use the calendar to recall the less vivid parts of my week. The rest is forgotten.
In the next step, I review my daily notes. They are my brain's staging area - a place to capture anything from random thoughts to tasks, interesting links, and ideas that need processing. It's like a mental inbox where everything lands first. To keep my mind (and notes) organized, during Week Summary, I move entries to their proper places - whether that's a dedicated topic note or into “📗 The Most Important Notes” section. Think of those two, Daily Notes + Week Summary, as a personal knowledge triage system - catch everything first in Daily Notes, then route it where it belongs during Week Summary.
The well-being check is my quick pulse check of the week - physical health, mental state, meditation practice, and overall energy levels. I've learned that tracking these consistently helps me spot patterns affecting my well-being. The happiness score (1-10) gives me a concrete way to compare weeks over time, though I've noticed it's more nuanced than just a number - sometimes a "6" week with deep work and growth feels more meaningful than an "8" with pure pleasure.
The relationship check is where I track my bonds with my inner circle and friends. It's not just logging interactions but actually processing the quality of our connections - did we have meaningful conversations, share experiences, or need follow-up? This is where I catch those "unread" messages I flagged during busy moments and turn them into action (now you know why I so often reply on Sundays). It's my weekly reminder that relationships need intentional nurturing, not just maintenance.
Money check - tracking the essentials (bills, monthly cash flow, and total value) and making sure I'm staying consistent with investments. It's less about penny-counting and more about maintaining my path to financial independence. Basically, it is my reality check that money's working for me, not vice versa.
Weekly planning: What exactly am I doing next week? I define the key actions for each active project and ensure they appear in my calendar as actual blocks of time. Sometimes, it’s also about realizing that my time is finite and I must postpone some projects (#prioritiesInLife). What’s important, in the template, I highlight the most important areas to make it a real priority - believe me or not, that was the case for Ph.D. for the last three years, but “hey, I did it!” and now I have (literally) more space for other things.
Anchoring each week is my relationship check-in with my partner. We share our responses to the following questions:
What was your most exciting thing of the week?
What am I grateful for about you last week?
Are there any new best memories together?
It's not just reflection - it's actively building our love story together and ensuring we see the magic in our everyday lives.
That wraps up the core check-in on my life pillars.
It's time for some digital clean-up to keep the system running smoothly.
In my world, it means catching up with all emails (#zeroInbox), editing all new photos on my phone, and cleaning up Downloads on the computer. Actually, email processing eats up the biggest chunk of time, but it's worth it - it forces me to be ruthless about what deserves space in my digital life. Each round of inbox clearing pushes me to unsubscribe from noise and focus on the signal. It's part of a broader push toward digital minimalism: less input, better quality, clearer mind.
Final checkpoint: zooming out to see if I'm moving in the right direction.
I scan through past weekly notes (sometimes with help from LLMs) to catch anything valuable that slipped through. Then, I check my Miro dashboard - my visual map of quarterly, yearly, and long-term goals. There are quick status updates there, but more importantly, it's my reality check on what actually matters. These moments of stepping back keep me from getting lost in the day-to-day rush.
That's the system - simple but adaptable.
When I need to track something new, I just update the template, and it's part of next week's flow. The whole process usually takes around two hours, though it can swing an hour either way, depending on the email backlog or how complex the week ahead looks.
The beauty is in the flexibility. The structure is there to serve me, not box me in. I've noticed this lightweight approach helps me stay consistent while still leaving room to evolve the system as my life changes.
Reader: God damn it, that’s a lot of things to track!
Patryk: You’re right, that’s why you should start small. Let me show you how my weekly summaries evolved over time.
🛳️ The Journey
Don't let the current template scare you.
It’s only a consequence of many iterations.
I started small. Like, really small.
My first Week Summary?
Two bullet points: career stuff and how I was feeling. That's it.
My second Week Summary?
Four bullet points: career stuff, feeling stuff, mood checks (tiredness, stress, focus, and happiness levels), and the most important notes from the week.
My third, fourth, … Week Summary?
Exactly the same for the next five months.
Only then did I start layering in new pieces - quarterly goals check-in, digital cleanup, and next week's planning. The habit muscle was strong by then, so tweaking the template felt natural.
From there, the system grew with me. Whenever something needed more attention, or I wanted to track a new area of life, it was added to the weekly check-in. There were no forced changes - just responding to real needs.
Today, it's my life's command center. It keeps me honest about what matters, whether I'm actually moving forward, and maintains order in my digital world. The template keeps evolving, but that weekly rhythm is my constant.
🤖 Referring back to Self-discovery with LLMs
Q: How do I use Week Summaries in my LLM-based personal assistant?
A: Week Summaries are the assistant's most comprehensive source of knowledge. They contain a summary of my most important events, reflections, emotional state, and other information. Thanks to that source, the model can answer questions with much more precision or answer the most complex and personal questions.
Q: That’s interesting, but how do you technically do that?
A: I copy and paste all the documents into one and process them using a simple Python script to delete all unnecessary noise, e.g., template components or URLs.
Q: Will I share the script?
A: Maybe in the future, but they are so simple that you can easily create them using any LLM.
✏️ Closing Remarks
I’m curious about your personal tracking habits. What metrics or moments do you monitor daily? Share what you think I'm missing out on and what you think I should start tracking!
Next week, we will cover an introduction to my personal knowledge base in Obsidian. That will help you know where and how all my notes live.
Okay, to be honest, I skipped once during my birthday week celebration in New York in 2024.
The Scott Adams quote brought back two thoughts I had during the period around the Worldwide Day of Goalsetting:
1. The importance of the environment - your process shows really well how to start caring about your digital environment (an important part of "the system")
2. We achieve identities, not goals. You cannot achieve any meaningful goal without changing who you are. That's why we should start by defining the person who can achieve what we want not the goal per se.
Great stuff :) With time the physical aspect of our body will require more attention in such summaries, i tend to look at my past week from that angle - "Did i move enough? Will i be able to move around freely when i'm 70? :)"