Monthly compilation

Monthly Compilation

Purpose

Use this skill to compile one month of weekly reviews into:

1. a draft monthly review in vault/journals/monthly/
2. a refined update to vault/promotion/candidates.md

This is a higher-level synthesis workflow than weekly compilation.

Its goal is to identify:

• what kind of month this really was
• what repeated across weeks strongly enough to matter
• where behavior aligned or drifted from stated priorities
• which promotion candidates should be confirmed, refined, merged, deferred, or discarded

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Inputs

Read the following inputs before drafting outputs:

Required

• all weekly reviews for the target month, which are located under vault/journals/weekly/YYYY. For example, weekly reviews in 2026 are stored in vault/journals/weekly/2026.
• vault/context/priorities.md

Use when relevant

• relevant project files under vault/context/projects
• relevant area files under vault/context/areas
• relevant note file under vault/context/notes/
• existing vault/promotion/candidates.md
• canonical promotion files for deduplication awareness only
• previous monthly review, if useful for continuity

Do not expand the scope unnecessarily. Prefer the smallest relevant context set that improves judgment.

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Output Files

This skill produces two outputs:

1. a monthly review draft in vault/journals/monthly/YYYY. For example, the monthly review for April 2026 should be stored in vault/journals/monthly/2026 and follow the naming convention of Monthly Review @yyyy-mm.
2. an updated vault/promotion/candidates.md

This skill may update vault/promotion/candidates.md, but it must not directly update:

• vault/promotion/insights.md
• vault/promotion/ideas.md
• vault/promotion/principles.md
• files under vault//context

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Core Workflow

Step 1: Read the month

Read the target month’s weekly reviews and identify:

• recurring wins and supportive conditions
• recurring frictions, drifts, and bottlenecks
• repeated project and area signals
• evidence of alignment or misalignment with stated priorities
• patterns that appear across multiple weeks, not just once

Step 2: Read current priorities

Read vault/context/priorities.md and identify:

• the current season
• relevant monthly priorities
• relevant quarterly priorities
• declared drift or failure modes
• explicitly deferred or non-current focuses

Use this file as the benchmark for alignment.

Step 3: Pull in relevant context

Read only the project and area files that materially improve interpretation.

Use project notes to understand:

• intended outcomes
• current bottlenecks
• risks and fake progress modes
• strategic significance

Use area notes to understand:

• standards
• current focus
• recurring risks
• positive and negative signals

Read notes under vault/context/notes/ only when they are explicitly linked in relevant source material or clearly necessary to interpret a repeated pattern, project signal, or area signal at monthly scale.

Use them selectively as supporting evidence or clarification. Do not expand monthly scope by scanning notes broadly.

Step 4: Review promotion staging

Read the current promotion/candidates.md and assess:

• which candidates now look stronger
• which candidates overlap and should be merged
• which candidates remain weak or thinly evidenced
• whether any higher-order candidate emerges only at monthly scale

Do not treat all prior candidates as valid by default.

Step 5: Diagnose the month

Form a grounded view of the month.

Answer:

• What kind of month was this, really?
• What moved meaningfully?
• What remained stagnant?
• What repeated strongly enough to matter?
• Where did behavior align with stated priorities?
• Where did it drift?
• What area or project signals stand out at monthly scale?
• Which promotion candidates deserve more confidence, less confidence, merging, or removal?

Step 6: Draft the monthly review

Generate the monthly review using the monthly review template located in templates/monthly-review.md.

Write clearly and diagnostically. Focus on:

• what defined the month
• what repeated
• what this month revealed more clearly than a single week could
• what should change next month

Step 7: Refine promotion candidates

Update vault/promotion/candidates.md based on monthly evidence.

Use the monthly layer to:

• confirm strong candidates
• refine wording
• merge overlapping candidates
• defer weak ones
• discard stale or unsupported ones
• add new candidates only when they clearly emerge at monthly scale

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Promotion Rules

Monthly promotion work is stricter than weekly promotion work.

The monthly layer should prioritize:

• confirmation
• refinement
• consolidation
• pruning

over raw candidate generation.

Candidate quality bar

A candidate is stronger at monthly scale when it is:

• visible across multiple weeks
• strategically meaningful
• behaviorally actionable
• transferable beyond the immediate month

Monthly-specific actions

Use the monthly run to:

• raise confidence on well-supported candidates
• lower confidence on weak candidates
• merge duplicate or overlapping items
• sharpen vague candidates into cleaner statements
• discard candidates that no longer look useful

New monthly candidates

Only add a new candidate if it becomes clear mainly from cross-week synthesis.

Examples:

• a month-long drift pattern
• a repeated area-level sacrifice
• a broader principle that no single week clearly showed
• a strategy or content idea that crystallized across several reviews

Do not promote

Do not strengthen or add candidates for:

• isolated weekly frustrations
• thin patterns with weak evidence
• generic motivational ideas
• inflated conclusions from a noisy month

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Writing Standards

For the monthly review

Write like a strategic diagnostic memo.

The review should be:

• concise
• comparative
• pattern-aware
• action-oriented

Avoid:

• rehashing daily detail
• merely stacking weekly summaries
• vague self-improvement language
• false precision

For promotion candidate updates

Be conservative and explicit.

If refining a candidate:

• make it clearer
• make it more evidence-based
• make it easier to route and review

If merging candidates:

• preserve the strongest version
• remove redundant phrasing

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Consistency Rules

The monthly review and the candidate updates must agree.

Do not confirm a candidate at high confidence if the monthly review does not support it.

Do not let the monthly review ignore a strong repeated signal that is being promoted.

The monthly promotion stream should feel like a natural consequence of the monthly diagnosis.

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Update Boundaries

This skill may:

• create or update the monthly review draft
• create or update vault/promotion/candidates.md

This skill must not:

• edit daily journals
• edit weekly reviews except by explicit instruction
• edit files under vault//context
• edit canonical promotion files
• silently redefine priorities, projects, or areas

If a context file appears stale or misaligned, note it in the monthly review rather than rewriting it.

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Completion Checklist

Before finishing, confirm:

• the monthly review reflects the target month accurately
• priorities were actually used as an alignment benchmark
• repeated patterns were identified across weeks, not just copied from one week
• candidate updates are more selective and refined than weekly outputs
• weak candidates were not preserved automatically
• no canonical promotion files were modified
• no vault/context files were modified
• the review and candidate updates are consistent with each other