Weekly planner

Print one sheet on Sunday evening or Monday morning and keep it where you can see it all week. The value of a week on paper is that it shows the shape of the whole week at once, which is the only way to notice that Thursday is already full before you promise someone Thursday.

1. Write the Monday date on the week-of line, and the day number in the small blank at the top right of each column.
2. Fill in fixed commitments first, in every column, before you plan any work at all. Appointments, travel, deadlines that belong to other people.
3. Write the week's three priorities in the row underneath. Keep them to outcomes you could tick off by Friday, not ongoing areas of responsibility.
4. Assign each priority to specific days in the columns above. A priority with no day next to it is a wish, and it will still be there next Sunday.
5. Use the next-week box during the week for anything that arrives and does not fit. It turns "I should do that" into a written decision to do it later.
6. On Friday, cross off what is done and copy the rest onto next week's sheet by hand. Copying things repeatedly is a useful cost: it makes you drop what you were never going to do.

A worked example: a week with "ship the pricing page" as priority one gets two Tuesday lines and two Wednesday lines reserved for it. Thursday already holds a day of interviews, so nothing else goes there. When a colleague asks for a review on Wednesday, the sheet answers for you: Wednesday is spoken for, and the request goes in the next-week box with a note to reply on Friday.

For a version that tracks projects and estimates rather than blank lines, see the Tasks tool.

Spend five minutes with the finished sheet before you print the next one. The point is not to feel good about the ticks; it is to find the one thing about next week that should be different.

Look first at how full each column ended up. Two columns that never fill are where your real slack sits, and they are the columns to put the awkward work in next time rather than the ones that already look busy. Columns that overflowed into the margin are a sign you were distributing by wish rather than by capacity.

Then check the three priorities against what is crossed off. If none of the crossed items are the priorities, the week went to other people's work, which is sometimes the correct answer and is always worth knowing. Three sheets running where the third priority is untouched means you have two priorities a week, not three, so write two and stop pretending.

Read the next-week box last, and read it as a list of what you were unable to protect rather than as a list of leftovers. An item that has survived two Fridays needs either a column of its own on Monday or a line through it.

Writing times into the day columns. The columns carry no time axis on purpose, and adding one turns a map of the week into a timetable that the first delay invalidates. Times belong on a daily sheet, where there is a schedule column to hold them.

Loading Monday to Wednesday and leaving Thursday and Friday clear for flexibility. What actually happens is that the blank days absorb everything that slipped, so the end of the week is heavier than the start and the flexibility was never real.

Filling the columns before the three priorities. The priorities are the constraint the rest of the week is arranged around, so they go down first; written afterwards, they become a summary of what you had already decided to do.

Copying an item forward in the same words for a third week. If two weeks of rewriting have not moved it, the wording is hiding something, usually a first step you have not worked out. Rewrite it as the next physical action or cross it out.

Leaving the small rule at the top of each column blank. Without the day numbers, a sheet that gets knocked off the desk is just seven columns of handwriting, and a finished sheet you find later cannot be dated at all.

One copy covers seven days and gets looked at on every one of them, so this is a sheet to put somewhere vertical: pinned beside the desk, or inside a cupboard door if the week is nobody else's business. It has to be readable without being picked up, because the moment you have to handle it to consult it is the moment you stop consulting it.

The columns carry no printed dates, which is what lets one file serve any week. Fill all seven day numbers in at once when the sheet comes out of the printer, and add the year beside the week-of line if you intend to keep the sheets. A line reading "14 April" is no use to you two years later.

Each writing line is about two centimetres wide once the column borders are taken off, so write the noun rather than the sentence. "Pricing page" fits and reads at arm's length; "finish writing the copy for the new pricing page" does not, and shrinking your handwriting to fit defeats the purpose of putting it on a wall.

If a week runs across a month boundary, write both month names beside the week-of line. It costs nothing and it prevents the one filing mistake this sheet is prone to.