The Second Reader: Why a Weekly Review Stops When Nobody Opens It

I looked at what page one tells a coach about the weekly review. Eight organic results, nearly all of them templates and checklists, with an AI Overview above them citing Todoist, Getting Things Done and Craft. Not one of those titles names the person who reads the finished review. Call that missing person the second reader, and the little evidence there is points at them and not at the checklist.

I build software for coaches, so I had a stake in that answer before I started counting.

Why does a weekly review stop after a few weeks?

It stops at the second step. The capture usually holds and things get written down; what fails is the sweep where they get looked at and moved somewhere. Read the r/ADHD planner threads and the complaint is almost never about the writing. One poster: “I can never seem to remember to CHECK the damn thing.”

I have written before about why these systems die around week three.

Does a better plan fix it?

The strongest candidate says no. In a 2025 adherence trial, Ahmadyar and colleagues gave one group if-then implementation intentions and the other group plain tips, and adherence came out at 71% (SD 27%) against 72% (SD 21%).

If-then planning is the usual fix here. Gollwitzer’s own summary of the method says the effects are strongest where self-regulation is the thing going wrong, which is the case a coach looks at every week. So it was a fair test. It is also one trial whose abstract does not say who was in it, so I am not stretching it to adults with ADHD.

What does a second reader change?

One thing in the gap between sessions has a receipt behind it. The Solanto CBT digest calls homework done between sessions “the single most powerful predictor of how much benefit the individual derived”, and gives half of every session to reviewing it. That is one digest, in CBT rather than coaching.

So a review with a second reader needs three things the templates leave out:

1. A person with a name who will open it.
2. A time they expect it by, in their week and not only the client’s.
3. A first question other than “what did you do.” Ask which day the plan stopped fitting.

The limit, once: no randomised trial shows ADHD coaching works. Sibley and colleagues surveyed 481 coaches for JAMA Network Open in January 2026 and found 89.3% of them have no professional mental-health background. The second reader is a guess with one receipt behind it.

Before you hand a client another template, tell them who opens it, and when.

Questions people ask next?

What should go in a weekly review?

Whatever survives a bad week. The Getting Things Done checklist is the version page one keeps pointing to and it runs long, so cut it to the few lines that produce something your reader can act on, then keep those same lines next week.

What method is recommended for a weekly review?

GTD’s Weekly Review, by default, because it is what Google’s top results and its AI Overview both point to. No trial has tested any weekly-review method in adults with ADHD, so treat a method as a starting format and watch what your client finishes.

Should the review change the plan every week?

No. A weekly look is for noticing. One instruction in the coaching canon puts it as evaluating weekly without changing strategies weekly, and two thin weeks is not enough to judge a strategy, which is the mistake a fresh template invites.