Is procrastination something you struggle with because you don’t know how to organize your time and/or your priorities? If you want to get more things done that will take you closer to your goals, this post is perfect for you. Keep reading to find an easy 5-steps guide to learn how to plan your weekly schedule and achieve more things every week.
At the end of this post, download a free customizable weekly planning checklist to keep you at par with your schedule.
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Table of Contents
The Importance of Planning Your Week For Success

Hi girls, how are you today?
Ever had difficulty planning for the week ahead?
Not knowing what to focus on and which tasks are more important to prioritize?
The solution to your stress and overwhelm could be to plan your week with an organized schedule.
In this blog, we are big fans of the Pareto Principle of working smarter, not harder.
I used to be the type of blogger who would work hours on end, including weekends, yet I was getting small outcomes. This resulted in me having constant burnouts and self-doubt days wondering if I was really cut out for this, regardless of my seemingly endless passion trying to make this work.
After reading Joy at Work, by Marie Kondo, I started understanding more about weekly planning ideas and how planning the week ahead could have great benefits to my productivity (and overall well-being).
Having a weekly schedule is a great way to organize your calendar in a way that makes your workweek manageable.
Planning your week is not only helpful for your professional life and work goals, but it also allows you to make time for personal affairs and self-care practices, which as super important to maintain a healthy mind, body, and soul.
Quick Tips for Planning Your Week’s Agenda
Let’s go over a few proven strategies on how to plan your weekly schedule.

Tip 1) Take a day to plan your week
Pick a day that works for you to review your goals and even your monthly plans. Understand how to differentiate important tasks from urgent ones.
Sundays usually are a great way to plan ahead and this further ensures you start the week on the right tone. By knowing how your week will look like by the time you start working on Monday, not only you guarantee being more focused but this also eliminates the feeling of overwhelm, right at the start of your week.
RELATED: A perfect self-care Sunday routine to get ready for the week ahead
Tip 2) Be compassionate with yourself
Keep in mind that plans often change and if you find yourself falling behind your monthly goals, have self-compassion and forgive yourself for falling behind. However, equally important is to assess why is it that you’re not on track with your goals.
Could this be because you’re waking up later, or that you are procrastinating to get things started? Have you been more distracted with social media during work hours, or is it simply because you miscalculated the time needed to accomplish a certain task?
Whatever your reasons are, rather than punishing yourself from falling behind, try to learn from what happened and work on improving this the following week.
Tip 3) Have a weekly planning checklist
A good weekly checklist should include blocks for projects, self-care practices, workouts, date nights, relaxation times, and house chores.
PS. I added ‘date nights’ because it is important we save time for our partners too. Often times we can get so consumed with life that we overlook the necessity of giving our partners the quality attention they deserve.
DOWNLOAD A FREE WEEKLY PLANNING CHECKLIST
How to Plan Your Weekly Schedule in 5 Steps
When you plan your week, you should aim to create weekly goals and daily goals
Your weekly schedule should provide a bird’s-eye view of your week, while your daily objectives create an outline of what you’re going to do each day
(this plan doesn’t have to be super detailed, since that would be better for a daily schedule. However, it should help you feel organized for the upcoming week).
For example, executive coach Rafael Sarandeses recommends setting five weekly goals and three daily goals to accomplish throughout the week. This is a great way to help guide your focus.
Let’s get right into it.

Step 1) Review your big plans
As we said, plans and goals change as we progress with our projects. That is why it is always important o review your yearly goals so that you can reassess your monthly priorities.
Step 2 ) Make a specific list of goals for the upcoming week
Write down all the things you wish to accomplish that week.
This could be as small as going out to buy more fruits to bigger projects such as hiring someone to help you with something you’re struggling with.
Daily tasks may be tasks that don’t necessarily take that much energy or time to complete, but that have a tangible impact on your progress
Step 3) Set Priorities for the week ahead
Going back to the lessons of Joy at Work, learn to differentiate important tasks from urgent ones.
A tip to keep you accountable is to color code these tasks (label or highlight these tasks) and aim to keep your week priorities list to around 3-7 items (it is crucial to be realistic or else you might easily fall behind and feel overwhelmed).
Step 4) Create Actionable Steps to Accomplish Your Priorities
A great tip on how to plan your weekly schedule is to create bulleted action steps for each of your to-do list tasks.
Take time to reflect on what are the steps needed to reach your week’s priorities and cross them out as you go.
I like giving myself a little star and write ‘’good job!’’ whenever I manage to cross out all my items. It is so satisfying!
A GOLDEN TIPS is to try to predict how much time each task will take. This will help you understand realistic goals and as well keep you accountable during the days that you work on them. If you believe a certain task will take you 1h to be done, but it takes you 2 hours instead, try and understand what happened and see if you can improve on it the following week.
Step 5) Organize Your Schedule
Assign priority tasks to work on for each day of the week.
A tip is to group similar tasks together so that your brain remains focused, as opposed to switching back and forth from completely unrelated activities.
Lastly, for each day of the week, choose one ‘star task’. This means one big thing that must be done.
This is a great way to keep you focused and completed important things daily.
The best tools to help plan your weekly schedule
It really depends on your preferences. A simple notebook and a pen can do you wonders. Other people like using simple tools such as excel.
A great and free software for planning your deadlines and keeping track of appointments is Asana.
Download a free weekly planning checklist below as well and start getting more organized today!
Books Mentioned in this post
What does your weekly planning process looking like?
Do you have any other tips on how to plan your weekly schedule that I forgot to mention?
Share any weekly planning tips you recommend in a comment below!
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Such great tips for planning your week ahead, Ana! I really love your easy to follow details, and I think this will help a lot of people be more productive. 🙂
P.S. I adore your blog! It’s beautiful and I’m looking forward to catching up on some of your others posts.
Hi Ashley, how are you? Thanks so much for the feedback. I’ve been diving deep into trying to improve the user experience so your comment came just in time to give me a big smile 🙂 You’re so sweet and I love connecting to like-minded bloggers so I will also be sure to be stopping by your blog often. Have a wonderful day, lovely <3
I just realized that I accidently pasted an Amazon link at the bottom of my comment a second ago and I am SO sorry. I meant to post the link to my blog and didn’t catch it until after I posted the comment. Just wanted to apologize for that!
Awww no worries, Ashley. I appreciate you letting me know. I have edited the comment to delete that last bit just because I am afraid it can come off as spammy and I am trying to improve my SEO in every way. But no worries at all 🙂 See you around, dear.
xx Ana
So many wonderful insights in this post! This is exactly what we should have been taught in school – so many of us need help with planning! I especially liked the paragraph about how to organize your schedule, planning similar tasks alongside each other so that your brain remains focused. Planning out all those big tasks as a star task per week also now sounds exciting instead of something to dread. Thank you for this wonderful read! Love, Susanne