journalsandplanners | Weekly templates and Bullet Journals

Crossposted to

bujo and my own journal.

At the moment, I'm really happy with the weekly planner template I use for my bullet journal. Many of the tutorials are monthly and daily, but I tend to plan in terms of weeks and tweaking things a bit has been working well for me.

This is what my view looks like at the start of the week:

I have a large section on top where I park what I want to accomplish during the week but not necessarily on Monday. This makes my daily migrations less painful and is helpful as I often have a bunch of phone calls or other "following up on appointments" things to do, that I tend to forget about until the end of the month if I leave them in the monthly section. Migrating them daily was super painful in the past and I always ended up giving up. This way, I also get a weekly reminder when I do a weekly migration. When I do that, I also go look at my monthly to-dos to see if I want to bring something else in.

At this point, I tend to use the monthly to-dos as a list to track "major" projects, the kind that requires a collection. So I'll have the project name in there and it's a reminder to go look at the related collection and pick a task or two from the more detailed to-do list there.

The little box on top, I wanted to use for choosing a main area of focus for the week but I tend to use it as a pep talk for myself and write a nice quote or little drawing. :)

Below the box is something I was missing for a while to keep track of recurring weekly tasks: when to take the trash out, etc. When I prepare my daily tasks I go back to the first page to check both the weekly to-dos and the recurring tasks. I took inspiration from the habit trackers out there and adapted it.

I found that I really like boxes: it's easy to do them quickly (so I don't procrastinate on preparing the next week) and apparently I find them very visually appealing, haha.

My monthly views used to look like this:

but as time passes I find the calendar less and less useful for monthly appointment reminders. It's nice to have the bird's-eye view but it takes forever to do and I'm constantly referring to my phone, the source of truth and where I actually get my reminders from.

I do find the weekly parking lots helpful though, to track what I want to do in a week or two (again, it's a lot of following on appointments if someone hasn't gotten back to me by then, or just trying to spread tasks around if they're not urgent so I'm not overloaded in the current week.) So, this month I tried just creating a page with 4 boxes, one for each week - we'll see how that goes! It's certainly faster to draw :)

So, that's how I adapted the method to my needs :) Do you use a bullet journal yourself? Have you made any modifications to the planner method you follow?