Weekly report template
A weekly report covers three things: what shipped, what's blocked, and what's next — in under one page. Ask your agent to draft it, share a link, and let comments land on the exact line.
Most weekly reports fail because they describe activity, not progress. "Worked on the onboarding flow" tells a reader nothing; "onboarding step 2 shipped to staging, waiting on design sign-off for step 3" tells them everything. The structure below is designed to force the second kind.
Draft it with your agent
Paste this into Claude, Cursor, or any agent — it drafts the weekly report and publishes it as a Drafty link your team can comment on directly:
See it on a real one
What goes in a weekly report
The sections that work consistently, regardless of whether you're a solo maker or a PM on a product team:
- What shipped — completed work only, written in past tense. Be specific: name the feature, the PR number, the decision, or the document. Vague entries ("worked on marketing") erode trust in the report over time.
- In progress — work that started but isn't done. Include a brief status note so a reader can tell if something's on track or quietly slipping.
- Blockers — anything stalled, with a named person who can unblock it. This is the most read section by managers. If you have no blockers, say so — it's a signal too.
- Next week — three to five priorities, ranked. More than five stops being a priority list and becomes a wish list.
Leave off the daily activity log. If your reader needs to audit your time, that's a different document. The weekly report is for alignment, not accounting.
The section most templates include that you should drop
Most weekly report templates have an "accomplishments" section that's secretly a second version of "what shipped." The duplication happens because people fill in one and then don't know what to put in the other. Merge them: "what shipped" is the accomplishments list, written concretely. One section, one list, no redundancy.
When to use a weekly report
- Solo maker or freelancer — keep yourself honest and give clients a link to react to instead of emailing a PDF that spawns questions.
- PM on a product team — replace the Friday-afternoon Slack wall of text with a structured link that engineering and design can comment on inline.
- Remote team — a shared weekly update replaces the status portion of a Monday standup, freeing the meeting for actual decisions.
If your weekly meeting is still 80% status updates after you introduce a report, the report isn't being read. Solve for that before adding sections.
FAQ
What should a weekly report include?
Four sections: what shipped (completed work, specific), in progress (current work + status), blockers (named, with an owner), and next week's priorities (ranked, not more than five). Everything else is optional depending on the audience — metrics, key decisions, and dependencies are worth adding if they're relevant to what your reader needs to know.
How long should a weekly report be?
One page. If it runs longer, trim the in-progress section first — that section tends to balloon. A reader who wants more detail can ask; a reader buried in a three-page update stops reading at paragraph two.
How do I write a weekly report for a manager?
Lead with outcomes, not effort. Your manager doesn't need to know you spent Tuesday debugging; they need to know the bug is fixed and it unblocked the release. Write the shipped section first and in the most concrete terms you can — a specific feature, a named decision, a PR merged. The effort is implicit.
What's the difference between a weekly report and a status update?
A status update is usually a short async message — a Slack thread, a quick email — scoped to one project or question. A weekly report covers a whole week across everything you own. Both are useful; the report replaces the recurring sync, not the ad-hoc update.
How do I write a weekly report quickly?
Keep notes throughout the week — a running list of "things I finished" takes 30 seconds per item in the moment and makes the Friday report a copy-paste job. Without the running list, you're reconstructing the week from memory, which is why most reports are written in 15 minutes and miss half of what happened.
What's the biggest mistake people make in weekly reports?
Writing for coverage rather than alignment. The instinct is to include everything you did so it looks thorough. But a long list of tasks makes it harder for the reader to spot what matters, which defeats the purpose. Lead with the most important thing that shipped. Cut anything that doesn't change what your reader would do or decide.