Client Check-In Questions: 40 Prompts for the Week Between Sessions

Ask a client "how was your week?" at the top of a session and you will usually get one of two answers: "good, yeah" or a detailed account of the last thirty-six hours. Neither is the week. The first is politeness, the second is the peak-end effect — the well-documented tendency to summarise a stretch of time by its most intense moment and its final one.

This is not a client honesty problem. It is a measurement problem. You are asking someone to summarise thirteen days from memory, in front of another person, while the meter is running.

Structured check-ins between sessions fix it by moving the question closer to the experience. Below are forty prompts organised by what you are actually trying to learn, plus guidance on cadence and on the mistake that kills most check-in systems.

Before the Prompts: Three Rules

• Short beats thorough. A three-question check-in answered eleven times is worth vastly more than a fifteen-question one answered twice. Completion rate is the whole ballgame.
• Same questions, every time. Varying prompts feels more engaging and destroys comparability. You want a trend line, not a scrapbook.
• Never let a check-in go unacknowledged. The fastest way to kill the habit is to have a client answer honestly into silence. More on this below.

Energy and Capacity (prompts 1–8)

The best early-warning indicators you have. Capacity drops before commitments start slipping, usually by a week or two.

1. Energy today, 1 to 10?
2. How did you sleep last night?
3. How full does the next three days feel?
4. What took the most out of you since we spoke?
5. What gave you energy since we spoke?
6. Are you looking after the basics — food, movement, sleep?
7. How much control did you have over your time this week, 1 to 10?
8. Is anything coming up that you are dreading?

Commitments and Follow-Through (9–16)

Ask about the specific commitment by name. Generic accountability prompts get generic answers.

1. Did you do the thing you said you would? Yes / partly / no.
2. If not — what got in the way? (No judgement, genuinely useful data.)
3. What made it easier or harder than you expected?
4. What is the smallest next version of it?
5. Does the commitment still make sense, or has it stopped fitting?
6. What did you do this week that you did not plan to?
7. What did you say no to?
8. On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you about the coming week?

Emotional State (17–24)

Ask about feelings specifically. "How are you feeling?" invites a summary; naming particular states produces far better signal, and the granularity of the answer is itself informative — clients who are struggling tend to describe their states in blunter, vaguer language. Our piece on emotional granularity covers the research.

1. Which three words best describe the last few days?
2. How anxious have you felt, 1 to 10?
3. How hopeful have you felt, 1 to 10?
4. What is occupying most of your head right now?
5. Has anything felt lighter than it used to?
6. Has anything felt heavier?
7. When did you last feel genuinely like yourself?
8. Is there anything you have been avoiding telling me?

Progress and Evidence (25–32)

These build the record you will show them in month six.

1. Where are you on the main goal today, 1 to 10?
2. What is one piece of evidence that things moved?
3. What would someone close to you have noticed this week?
4. What is working that you want to keep?
5. What is not working that we should stop?
6. What surprised you?
7. What did you learn about how you operate?
8. If this week repeated for a month, would that be fine?

Session Steering (33–40)

These convert a check-in into session prep, which is where the time saving actually comes from.

1. What do you want to spend our next session on?
2. Is there anything you want me to push you on?
3. Is there anything you want me to leave alone?
4. What question have you been sitting with?
5. What decision are you stuck on?
6. What would make the next session worth the money?
7. Is the pace right — too fast, too slow, about right?
8. Anything else I should know before we speak?

Choosing Your Set

Do not use forty. Pick three to five and keep them fixed for at least a quarter. A defensible default: one energy prompt (1), one commitment prompt (9), one emotional prompt (17), and one steering prompt (40). That is roughly ninety seconds of client effort and it covers capacity, follow-through, state, and agenda.

On cadence: weekly is the floor for fortnightly sessions. Daily works only when the prompt is genuinely tiny — a single number — and it produces a much better trend line, for the same reason described in our piece on why consistency beats intensity. Anything longer than weekly is not a check-in, it is a survey.

The Mistake That Kills Check-In Systems

Collecting them and not visibly using them.

If a client tells you on Tuesday that their energy is a 3 and you open Thursday's session with "so, how was your week?", you have taught them the check-in is admin. They will complete it for two more weeks out of politeness and then stop, and you will conclude that check-ins do not work for your clients.

The fix is small: reference it in the first thirty seconds. "I saw Tuesday was rough — do you want to start there?" That one sentence converts the check-in from homework into being paid attention to, which is the thing clients are actually buying.

Doing This Without Adding Admin

The obvious objection is that this is more work — another form to build, chase, read, and remember. Done manually, it is: a spreadsheet, a recurring reminder, and a habit of checking it that survives about a month.

Done properly it should cost you nothing per client per week. The prompts go out on their own, the answers arrive as a trend rather than a pile of messages, and the striking weeks surface without you going looking. That is precisely what Interlude is built to do — so the week between sessions stops being a blind spot you reconstruct, and starts being something you can simply read.