Halden 2.0 and the weekly review
How we designed a look back at the week that takes ten minutes, not an hour.
By Marta Ruiz
A weekly review is the habit almost every productivity book recommends and almost nobody keeps. The usual version asks you to go through every project, every list and every inbox, and by the third week it feels like homework. With Halden 2.0 we wanted a review that fits on a Sunday sofa with a coffee going cold.
It helps that Halden only has one thing a day. A week is seven things, not seventy, so there is very little to review.
Three questions, one screen
The review opens on Sunday evening, or whenever you choose in Settings. It asks three things, one at a time.
- What got done? Your seven days, each with its one thing and the focus time it took. Done days are dark, gaps are light.
- What slipped? Any thing that moved more than once. Halden asks whether to keep it, shrink it or let it go.
- What is next week for? One sentence. It sits at the top of Tomorrow every evening as a nudge when you pick the next thing.
Most people finish in under ten minutes. In testing, the median was six.
Why we left things out
Early versions had charts for focus time by hour, streak counts and a score for the week. People liked looking at them and then closed the app without changing anything. We kept the one number that made people act: how many of the seven days got their thing done.
We also left out planning the whole week ahead. Picking seven things on a Sunday sounds tidy, but by Wednesday half of them are wrong. The review sets a direction and leaves each day’s thing to that day’s evening.
What we learned from the beta
Two things surprised us. The question people spent longest on was the second one: deciding to let a slipped thing go turned out to be a relief, not a failure. And the sentence about next week mattered more than we expected. Testers who wrote one picked related things on more days, and finished more of them.
Try it
The weekly review is part of Halden 2.0 and available on every plan. Update the app, and the first review appears on Sunday evening. If Sunday is a bad day for it, move it in Settings, then Weekly review.