Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Planning a week at a time

It’s easy to get into a routine of postponing too many tasks too often. This week’s tip, shared by marthe.marthe, suggests a straightforward method for keeping track of just the current week, making your lists and projects more manageable.

I have tried many things to get my tasks done, and I finally have found a way without being busy and wasting time in endlessly rescheduling my tasks. I thought I would share it as there might be other people around using the same method.

What I have noticed and tried is first to make different lists of different activities that I have, based on Personal, Work, Home and other things in life. I initially tried to spread my tasks over the week by scheduling for every day a certain amount of tasks that I thought would be feasible to complete. However I found myself in rescheduling the tasks, postponing and feeling hopelessly lost in my work at the end of the week, because I never manage to finish them all.

Therefore I decided to mix RTM a bit with the insights of kanban flow and give all my tasks that need to be done on short notice the end date of Friday. That will set, for every list, the week’s goals. As you can imagine that will result in a long list with too many tasks. So what I have done to keep focused is to set my priorities by using the 1, 2, 3 priority indicators of RTM. The golden rule is that no more than three tasks in every list can have priority 1. So what happens now is that I have my focus of every list, limited to 3 top priorities. And whenever I finish all three of them, there is just a short list that I have to evaluate to consider the next top 3 priorities.

Of course there also are tasks that are repeating and come up during the week. But because I have used the priorities they are just on top of the list by due date and do not stop me from keeping my focus.

This way of working saves me a lot of time since now the only thing I have to do is evaluating my week and setting the new focus for the week, without rescheduling a lot, since all will move to the next Friday!

Thanks for sharing this tip, marthe.marthe! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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