When should I do the weekly review?

Friday afternoon while the week is fresh, or Monday morning if Fridays reliably collapse. Put it in the calendar as a real appointment: it is the first thing to evaporate otherwise.

Does this replace 1:1s?

No. It is the pass across the whole team that 1:1s structurally cannot give you, and it usually generates the specific questions you bring into next week's 1:1s.

A ten-minute weekly review for managers

This is a procedure, not a philosophy: five passes over your team, roughly two minutes each, once a week. Coverage, commitments, changes, patterns, and your own behaviour. It works because it looks across everyone at once, which is the only vantage point from which certain problems are visible at all.

Pass one: coverage (2 minutes)

List everyone you manage and mark who you have had a real conversation with in the last two weeks. Not a standup, not a passing message, a conversation.

Anyone unmarked is your first action. The people who go unmarked are almost never the ones in visible difficulty; they are the steady performers, which is exactly why they end up surprising you.

Pass two: commitments (2 minutes)

Go through what you owe people and mark anything older than two weeks.

For each aged item, do one of three things now: complete it, give a date, or tell them it is not happening. Carrying it silently into a third week is the option that costs you the most and feels like the least.

Pass three: changes (2 minutes)

Note what is different this week for anyone on the team: new project, changed scope, something personal they mentioned, a team change landing on them.

The purpose is to have one specific opener for each of next week's 1:1s. A specific opener is the single highest-leverage thing you can bring to the meeting.

Pass four: patterns (2 minutes)

Ask whether the same thing has come up with more than one person.

Two people mentioning the same blocker is a data point; three is a systems problem you should be fixing rather than absorbing one 1:1 at a time. This pass is the entire reason to review the team as a whole rather than person by person.

Pass five: your own week (2 minutes)

Two questions. Where did my attention actually go? And did I do the thing I said I would change last week?

Attention is the resource you are actually allocating as a manager, and it drifts toward whoever is loudest rather than whoever needs it. Noticing the drift weekly is enough to correct it; noticing it quarterly is not.

Where Emily fits

Four of these five passes require material you have to assemble by hand: who you met, what is open, what changed. Emily produces a weekly reflection from the context gathered during the week, so the review becomes reading and deciding rather than researching, and the question becomes where your attention is needed next. She reports what happened and stops there; nothing here is scored, and no week gets a grade.

The procedure above works with a notebook. It just takes longer, and the pass most likely to be skipped when you are short on time is pattern-spotting, which is the one worth the most.