My production markdown template — 2026 update

Back in 2023, I wrote about my markdown productivity template and the routine I built around it. Three years and a lot of weekly files later, it's time for an update.

I've kept the same core habit — one markdown file per week, tracked in Typora — but the template itself got simpler, and I added something I didn't expect to find useful so quickly: running AI on top of my own notes.

What I improved

I kept the routine going all year, and the main lesson was: simplify. Every extra section I added "just in case" ended up unused, so I trimmed the template down to four parts:

• A task bar with the tasks for the current week.
• A backlog tab, listed separately, where each task now carries a due date instead of just a vague "someday."
• A bilan (review) chapter, which I try to fill in every week. I'll be honest — this is still the part I struggle with the most. I don't love writing reviews of myself, but I force myself to do it because it's the section that pays off the most later.
• A notes chapter, where I jot down every point I need to raise in my meetings as they come up during the week.

Nothing fancy, but cutting the template down to these four blocks made it much faster to fill in daily, which is really the only thing that makes a routine survive past the first month.

Adding AI (Claude) into the loop

Markdown turns out to be a format AI tools handle very well — it's structured enough to parse, plain enough to read. So I started feeding my weekly files into Claude and asking it to analyze them.

The result genuinely surprised me. I have every weekly note going back to 2022, so I tried something bigger: I gave it a full year of notes and asked for a yearly bilan of 2025. What came back was a solid, honest summary of my year — patterns I'd missed, recurring blockers, projects that quietly stalled. Having an automatic, external point of view on my own work turned out to be far more useful than I expected.

That pushed me to build a new routine on top of the old one:

• Monthly: I pass the AI my weekly notes from the past month to catch anything I missed or didn't follow up on.
• Quarterly: I run a broader analysis every three months, which I use to adjust where I focus my work.
• Yearly: a full pass on the year, the same way I did for 2025.

It costs me almost nothing — the notes already exist, I'm just asking for a second opinion on them.

Conclusion

The template is simpler than it was in 2023, and the routine around it is basically the same: write it down, review it weekly, review it monthly, review it again at the end of the year. The new piece is letting an AI do a pass on top of mine. It doesn't replace the weekly bilan — it just gives me a perspective I can't really give myself, since I'm too close to my own notes to see the patterns in them.

If you already keep weekly notes in markdown, this costs you nothing to try: pick a few months of notes, paste them in, and ask for an honest summary. Worst case, you learn nothing new. Best case, it's like mine was — a small surprise.!