Organising my home tasks with a week planner

I am a big believer that a good organisation system should work in the office as well as at home. So when I first created my day planner for work I used the same format at home.  It was successful, however it took a long time to plan a work day evening reducing the available time to actually get things done. I also became aware that many of the tasks that I was completing were of a similar type and not reflective of the range of tasks I wanted to do. So I wanted to develope a system that is easy to complete and ensured a good mix of tasks.

I liked the idea of Stephen’s week calendar where you can see a week on one page and thought a similar approach would work for my home tasks. The first version of my home planner included an area for repeating tasks , however now that I have a RollaBind organiser I have introduced another way to deal with repeating tasks , reducing the space I need on my home planner, meaning I could reduce the size of the form from A4 to A5.

The form has four areas:

Task area

There are 14 boxes each representing a different area of my life e.g. website, writing, health, friends. On Sundays I go through my home task list and add two tasks to each section on the form. This provides a spread of tasks to ensure I am progressing each area of my life, but is also a manageable number to complete in a week (although I haven’t actually completed all of them yet). There is also an area to mark any deadlines and to highlight any tasks that I am resisting.

Same week urgent

As I am planning one week at a time, it is possible that tasks will arise that need to be completed in the week so I add these to the Same Week Urgent box. Any other tasks that arise during the week I add to my task list where they will be reviewed the following week.

Reminder of the order to complete tasks

Without this reminder I might have a tendency to select the tasks I want to do rather than the ones that I ‘should’ be doing. As my home task list is kept in Excel I use filters to help identify the tasks to be added to the week planner in the order shown here.

Weekly Review Checklist

To encourage me to complete my weekly review, each component is included on the week planner to act as a reminder and so I can cross them off when I complete them.

So far I have found this system works well for the time I have available to plan my tasks at home, but I plan to review it when I have identified my goals so it supplies the framework to ensure I keep moving to where I what to go.

Do you use the same or different organisation systems at work and home?