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How To Organize A Weekly Planner
How to Organize a Weekly Planner
A weekly planner can be a useful tool for students and working professionals alike. It helps to keep your life organized, as well as to ensure things get done and appointments are not missed.
What Is A Weekly Planner?
A weekly planner is like a combination between a journal and a calendar. It helps you to plan out and organize your tasks, appointments, and responsibilities. A planner can be set up as a daily or a weekly planner. The weekly planner typically shows your entire week spread out across two adjacent pages. Each week can be set up Monday-Sunday, or Sunday-Saturday, depending on the style and format of the planner.
Weekly planners are designed so that you can plot out your week at a glance. It allows you to come up with an action plan for each day of the week, depending on the responsibilities and prior commitments you may have each day. You can then analyze your performance at the end of the week and decide if you’ve over or under-estimated your capabilities. From there, you can set new goals for the next week.
Wrinkle and Crease has a number of weekly planners available. Shop our weekly planners today and increase your organization game.
Why Should I Get a Weekly Planner?
There are many pros to getting a weekly planner, from feeling more accomplished and organized to getting a greater perspective about your life and your habits.
Increased Productivity
A planner helps you to increase productivity, motivation, and to get more organized. All of these are tied together-- for example, your increased motivation also affects your productivity. It is easier to organize your tasks when you record them and have a visual, allowing you to plan for the most productive sequence of events for your week. This is especially helpful for busy days that may have been overwhelming otherwise.
Just as speaking a goal out loud makes it seem more serious and legitimate, writing down a goal can also make you more motivated to achieve it. You can also track your goals and tasks in your planner and reward yourself for doing well as an extra motivation. Many planners come with stickers that you can use as a motivation to yourself for completing difficult tasks or reaching new goals. It also makes your planner more of a joy to look at if you decorate it this way!
Perspective
Having a planner and recording all of your responsibilities in one central location helps to show you, at a glance, everything that’s on your plate. This will help you to get some perspective on your responsibilities, as well as help you to see if you are overextending yourself. Looking at a visual such as your weekly planner will help you to evaluate if you need to cut back on certain responsibilities or decline new opportunities that may cause you too much strain.
Keeping a planner is also a way to preserve your memories. If you keep your planner after you’ve filled it for the year, you have a year’s worth of memories to look back on. Flipping through an old planner, you may find reminders about an amazing vacation you went on, or the first day of a new job.
Organizing Your Weekly Planner
Now that you know what a weekly planner is for and how it should be used, the next step is to figure out a system for how yours will be organized. Take a look at some of the guidelines below.
Task Lists
Create your to-do lists, and make sure to designate a special space in your planner for these. If they are not scrawled in the margins and have a rightful place, they are less likely to be overlooked! If a new task pops up during the week, after you have already set your to-do list, be sure to add it into this designated section. This way, every task is in one central location, rather than in many different spots-- some of which could be missed.
Once your task list is set up, go back in and prioritize your to-dos. You’ll want to figure out a way of coding your task lists that appeals to you. For example, you could color code with gel pens and highlighters, which also makes the process more fun. However, you could also decide you prefer to keep things simple and just use numbers.
Assign Each Task a Number
Assign each task a number-- or however you decide to code this-- in order to rank your list from most to least urgent. This way, if your week becomes too hectic, you have an overview of what absolutely needs to get done and what can be left for next week if need be.
Add Time Assignments
When going through your task list, another way to organize it further is to assign an amount of time to each task. Make a note next to the task of how much time you believe it will take you. You can also color code this if you’d like. This helps you to do a quick scan and pick from your tasks based on the amount of free time you have at that moment. It will also help you to prioritize which tasks get done faster. For example, maybe you’ll want to knock out several of the quicker tasks in the morning to start your day feeling more productive.
Break It Up Into Smaller Tasks
Sometimes, larger tasks can seem more daunting and leave you wondering where to start. Instead, break these tasks up into smaller actionable tasks, or sub-categories of the original task. For example, if your original task was to do your research project, you can break it into smaller steps, such as finding sources or writing an outline. This is also helpful in that it makes you feel more accomplished as you complete and cross off these smaller tasks, instead of waiting to complete the larger umbrella task. It can be more motivating this way!
More Tips
- Set aside time to plan
- Keep everything in the same planner
- Always write everything down
- Create a “Top Three” task list for busier days
- Also include time commitments such as your meals/meal planning, workouts, etc
- Utilize your planner’s monthly calendar, too
FAQ
How do Planners Stay Organized?
Planners stay organized first and foremost by working with their planners everyday. When things get away from us it is much harder to catch up.
- Refer to your planner every day
- Treat it like it really matters, and you need it to work
- Write everything down
- Refer to it during decision making and often so you don't double book
- Take it with you
People who are good at organizing and planning have a system, and work that system so that it keeps them efficient and on top of things.
How Do you Use a Weekly Planner?
You use a weekly planner a little differently than a daily planner. With a daily planner usually it's for a year, and it has everything for the day to day. With a weekly planner you usually have a one week snapshot of things that are important to you for that week.
Often these are things that change from week to week, like appointments, dinner menus and some repetitive tasks.
A weekly planner will also help you with goals. You can start with a big picture goal for the week, then break it down into smaller pieces.
These smaller pieces can be written out on your weekly planner. As you accomplish those tasks you work your way to completing your goal.
How do I keep My Planner Organized?
A planning system is critical to keeping your planner organized. Systems and planner organization tips are great only if you implement them, and find the ones that work for you. Planner organization tips, especially for a paper planner, only work if you implement them into your everyday life.
If you have a number of things that are the same tasks as other weeks, or the week ahead, you can save time by simplifying your system. One central location for your organizing will help, as will having one planner to keep track of those important tasks.
However.
Sometimes multiple planners can help separate certain kinds of tasks from others and keep you on track. Having a monthly planner, or multiple planners can also help you separate the small picture stuff, and big picture stuff.
Wrinkle and Crease has a number of paper planners available that are great for a to do list, time management, and to stay focused.
How Do I Pick the Right Planner?
This is really a personal choice, but as mentioned above the biggest thing is that it needs to work for you. No one is going to use a planner unless it is the right planner.
If you are thinking about your upcoming week, or a new planner, or laundry day, or due dates all of these things can be organized on a planner, but you are the one that needs to write them down.
That means that the tools you get have to work for you, from the different colored pens to the washi tape to the stickers it all has to help you actually use the planner.
When you are considering what planner to get you have to know for sure that not only will you use it, but you will enjoy it because of the style of planner it is and how it makes you feel.
What Should a Weekly Planner Include?
There are a whole number of different things that you can include in your weekly planner. Here is a short list.
- Daily tasks
- Upcoming week appointments
- To Do Lists
- Bigger tasks
- laundry day
- Due dates
- Inspirational Quotes
- Grocery Lists
- Birthdays anniversaries
The biggest thing about a weekly planner is deciding what you are going to use it for. If you already have a daily planner then potentially you need to decide which tasks go where. This can be very helpful however.
If you are starting from scratch and do not have a planner at all then a weekly planner is a great place to start.
You can begin by only adding certain tasks and then completing them as you go each week.
Remember that using a planner should be encouraging and have your own style built into it. That way not only will you continue using it, it will actually benefit your life.
Learning to plan ahead and not forget things is a journey, and can take time to perfect. Use your planner, stay productive and write things down. These are the simple part of becoming a great planner. Happy planning.