The 10-minute weekly review that compounds

The weekly review is where a journal turns into improvement. Logging trades captures the raw material; the review is where you actually look at it. And like the journal itself, the version that works is the version that's small enough to survive contact with real life.

Ours takes about ten minutes. Same questions every week, in the same order, so there's nothing to decide — you just answer.

Open the week's trades in one view — calendar or list — and answer these, in writing, in your journal:

• What did I trade, and did each trade have a plan before entry?
• Which single trade cost me the most — and was it a bad plan or a broken rule?
• Which setup or session made money this week? Which lost it?
• Where did emotion show up — and what triggered it?
• What is the one thing I'm doing differently next week?

A three-hour Sunday analysis feels productive, but it has the same failure mode as the over-built journal: you'll do it twice and then never again. Ten focused minutes, done fifty weeks a year, compounds into something no marathon session can match — a continuous, honest record of what you keep doing and what it keeps costing.

The other advantage is trend visibility. Answer the same five questions every week and your journal starts answering back: the same setup keeps appearing in question three, the same trigger in question four. That repetition is the signal. One review tells you about a week; a stack of them tells you about yourself.

Anchor the review to something that already happens — Friday close, Sunday evening coffee, whatever is already in your week. Put the answers in your journal, not a separate doc, so next week's review starts by reading last week's "one thing".

Then let the streak do the work. You won't notice the difference after one review. You will after twelve.