Obsidian Workflow: Speed up your Weekly Review

A weekly review that used to take 2–3 hours can be cut to roughly 30–40 minutes by wiring Obsidian daily notes into an automated weekly note. The core idea is simple but powerful: daily logs already contain the raw material—what happened, how it felt, what was read, what tasks remain, and which habits were checked—then Dataview rollups and the Habit Tracker plugin aggregate that information into a single weekly page. That weekly page then becomes the decision hub for next week, reducing the mental load of remembering everything and planning from scratch.

The system is built around Obsidian’s Periodic Notes plugin, which creates daily and weekly notes in a consistent folder structure. Daily notes are where interstitial journaling happens (timestamped “logs”), along with tags and categories for things like daily checklists and habit-related to-dos. Weekly notes are named with a start date baked in, because the template logic depends on the locale’s week start (Monday vs. Sunday). Periodic Notes uses the first day of the week setting for date ranges, but the template also needs to stay aligned with the correct weekly note; otherwise, clicking between weeks can show mismatched date information.

Templater and Dataview do the heavy lifting for automation. Templater generates weekly notes with the correct date boundaries and pulls in the “Note for next week” section from the previous weekly review. Dataview then filters daily entries to only the current week’s range (Monday–Sunday in the example) and renders tables for items like “memories,” “goals,” and “tasks.” Memories roll up from daily notes tagged with a specific journal memory tag and emoji, with additional safeguards using file creation/modification times so stray or incorrectly linked notes don’t pollute the weekly summary.

Habits are handled in two complementary ways. For mini-habits, the Habit Tracker plugin checks whether specific to-dos were ticked in daily notes and produces counts plus a calendar-style view with annotations (e.g., whether work happened, whether exercise happened). For cross-note tracking, tags provide autocompletion and easier reuse than Dataview inline fields. The weekly template also uses careful formatting tricks—like square-bracket wrapping around Dataview inline fields—to include only the intended portion of a sentence and to simulate line breaks where Dataview otherwise only reads the first line.

The weekly review template itself is organized with metadata (life/work, note type, status, date range, and monthly parent). It follows a Getting Things Done-inspired checklist: task generation (calendar, email, Slack), trigger lists for responsibilities and long-term projects, and a “next weekly review” capture area where items are sorted into must-do, bonus, or miscellaneous. Rollups then summarize what was created or modified during the week, what remains incomplete, and what insights were captured.

By the end, the weekly review page functions as both a retrospective and a planning worksheet—automatically populated from daily notes, while still leaving a structured place to decide what matters next week. The result is less worry about missing something and a workflow that’s fast enough to actually keep up with.