This system is what I use every day to track if things I'm trying are working over time, especially with my ADHD tendencies.

At this point in my life, it's less about productivity and achievement. For me, it's more about acting with intention. while accepting the way my brain works. And I figure, you can't act with intention unless you can properly see what you've done in the past.

This system allows me to see what I've learned, what worked well, and what could have worked better at a glance even from the beginning of the year.

Inspired by Mason Royal's presentation at Linking Your Thinking, I modified his Automated Review Roll ups to better align with my goal of intention.

I also added elements from the Full Focus planner system and 12 Week Year for my daily and weekly reviews, as well as goal setting. I was also inspired by RadReads for some content in the yearly reviews.

The "journal" templates that make up the review system. The vision, goals, and habits templates helps support your intention work. Place all of these into your templates folder in your Obsidian setup.

You will need to have Obsidian and the plugins Dataview and Templater installed.

Mason's templates (and my own personal working system) also include Tasks and task reviews, but I have removed the task system from these templates to simplify things. I may develop a separate post about task management later.

Daily reviews roll up to weekly reviews, which roll up to monthly reviews, which roll up to quarterly reviews, which roll up to yearly reviews. I use each review as an opportunity to summarize my logs from the previous period. This is how I'm able to see what I was thinking about months ago.

Here is an example of how I log habits in a daily review file:

Here's how my daily habits are visible in the weekly review, and how I can use it to summarize how I did on my habits every day:

I've left these templates with placeholder habits and identities, so you can track where in the templates to modify them. You'll also likely need to learn a bit of how Dataview works so you can modify any queries to your liking.

Using Moment.js syntax with the Templater plugin means you don't have to calculate any dates when you create a new file. Just click through to a new date, fire up Templater, select the template you want, and it'll do the job!

But this also means that you need to schedule the reviews on time. Otherwise you'll need to edit some of the calculated dates. Not a dealbreaker, but definitely annoying.

You should create each review file from its corresponding template before midnight on the last day before the stated period is over. For example:

• Daily reviews before midnight
• Weekly reviews before Saturday is over
• Monthly reviews before the last day of the month is over
• Quarterly reviews before the last day of the quarter is over
• Yearly reviews before January 1 You can create the files anytime beforehand, but they won't populate with your content until there's something to roll up.

I've included templates for goal-setting, habit setting, and visioning work. Keep in mind that I use "goal" here very loosely, since my system isn't really about achievement.

These are heavily inspired by the Full Focus planner system. I use these templates to do some thinking ahead about what I'd like for myself in the future. I then include them into the priorities section in the yearly review file. The intention is to keep these visible every day, because I've found that any sense of urgency is lost if I don't see them regularly.

To use them within the review system, I state the goal in the title of the Obsidian file, and prepend it with "[current year] goal" or "[current year] habit."

Every 3 years (or so) I like to set aside some time to take stock of where I am and where I'd like to go. You need to manually update any reference to the vision files to how you want it to work - that's not automated. Again, it's a place to do some separate thinking that I then bring into the yearly review file.

I'm constantly fiddling with these review templates. 2023 was the first year I used this system. I was impressed at how I was able to take stock of my growth and progress, while also identifying places I still needed to build systems and guardrails. So if I figure out more systems and guardrails, I'll add them!