Combining Daily Planner Pages with a Weekly Plan

Since I've moved to mostly daily pages in my planner, people keep asking the same question over and over - "do you also use weekly pages?"

It's complicated. You know I love some weekly pages. And for good reason.

Weekly planning pages have some advantages over daily planning pages in a planner.

Weekly pages allow you to overview tasks that need to be done in the near future, but are not day-specific. In addition, weekly planner pages keep stuff from "disappearing" from your radar just because you HAD to pick a day to write the task on.

But my schedule has recently gotten complicated and daily planning became a necessity. 

As you can see in the above link, at first, I used dailies as a supplement for weeklies. That made sense at the time since I needed dailies only on some days.

Use Dailies for Day-to-Day Planning

Lately, though, I need dailies every day, and constantly recopying seems a waste of time. I was dealing with the loss of weekly pages with staggered context lists. 

(I still love that idea of context lists and if you are married to consistent weeklies or dailies, use it! Or use it in your to do section. Use it the staggered lists to make Christmas gift lists. Be creative.)

Use Time-Sensitive Staggered Lists as Weeklies

This month, I repurposed those context lists because they were just not time-sensitive enough to replace weekly pages.

For example, if I have three errands to run into the city from the suburbs where I reside, I'd usually prefer to run them all on the same day to save gas and time. Putting them on the same list seems reasonable.

But what if only one is DUE by the end of the week and this week is very overscheduled?

In fact, right this moment, a scheduling form is due to physical therapy. However, this is a really busy week for me, with my kids returning to school, so I need to only do the DUE things and nothing extra.

Plus, having the task that is terribly time-sensitive on the context list took it off my radar.

Instead, I've continued to use context codes for quick grouping of items, but made a weekly-based staggered task list (as seen in the above picture) to take over the hard work of my no longer existing weekly pages.

This is working much better.

For example, time-sensitive stuff that I couldn't do until Week 2, when the boys returned to school during the day, went on that list. I need to enroll in traffic school (oops) and file some insurance reimbursements. I don't want to get my car inspected until the end of the month since after a certain date I get an extra month free. So that goes on the Week 5 list. Both freezers need to be cleaned out (two big jobs), so I put them on separate weeks (Weeks 2 and 3).

Once Week 1 passes, I recopy any tasks that were left undone to another list (or delegate or delete them) and I move the Week 1 list to the BACK of the time-sensitive lists to start next month's weeklies. (Since I make each list 2 or 3 pages long, I can do this and just add more pages as needed).

Basically, this means I am making my own weekly pages, still using monthlies exclusively for appointments/DUE dates (but copying only that onto my daily schedule), and putting day-specific stuff and just tomorrow's plan on my dailies.

So, for all who asked, I hope I answered your question! No, I don't use weeklies anymore. Well, not exactly. :)

Etcetera.

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