Things that aren’t scheduled in daily schedule maker and planned in task planning tool rarely get done. Planning your weeks properly will make sure your dreams become a reality.
At Bordio, we are avid schedule planners ourselves, and we know how hard it can be to find the tools that keep us productive and organized.
Today we are sharing a selection of free printable weekly planner templates that will empower you to achieve more and deal with tasks, chores, and appointments more easily.
Why planning your weeks is important
Planning time is a great yet often underestimated instrument for living a better life.
What stands between us and our goals is usually the lack of action. Sometimes the goals are so big that we don’t know where to start and simply give up. Other times, it’s the absence of a plan and structure that prevents us from getting to where we want.
Whatever circumstances you find yourself in, spending time to plan your day ahead and create a roadmap will make a huge difference.
People who plan, especially using time management software, enjoy many benefits that result from this process, for example:
- Feel like they have more time during the day.
- Pursue hobbies and pet projects.
- Have a healthy work-life balance.
- Achieve their goals (and do it faster).
- Experience less stress and anxiety.
Download blank weekly planner templates with extra sections
Our designer printable weekly templates are not only useful but also pleasant to work with.
They feature sections, such as goals, to-dos, and priorities, to complement your weekly planning and make it more efficient. With this free weekly planner template, you will not forget about an important event coming up and will have plenty of time to work on all tasks.
Tip: If you’re looking for a free monthly calendar planner or a daily planner, check them out on Bordio’s website, where you will find many online calendar planner options.
Digital weekly planners
This article is all about free printable weekly planner templates, but have you considered a digital weekly planner?
We don’t believe in people being either paper or digital-only. Some things work better on paper, others fit nicely on a screen. What we suggest is to use Bordio’s free virtual planner solution for extensive planning, goal setting, and brain dumping your tasks. Then take the printable weekly planner and use it to highlight top-priority tasks, track healthy habits, set weekly goals, and keep up with meetings and appointments.
You can have your master plan all detailed in the digital solution and then target specific elements of it with the printable planner.
Here is why digital weekly planners are awesome:
- They never run out of space – write as many notes and make them as lengthy as you want.
- Made a mistake? No worries! Delete anything that doesn’t make sense with a couple of clicks.
- Take them anywhere with you. You already carry your smartphone with you everywhere, which means that your digital planner is always with you too. Forget about bulky paper planners and tearing them apart.
- Collaborate easily. Whether it’s a work project or a personal endeavor, you can share your plans, goals, and achievements with anyone anytime – just copy your notes and send them across.
Download minimalist weekly planner templates
The following weekly templates are perfect for someone looking for a minimalist weekly planner with a strong focus on the tasks for the day.
With these free weekly schedule templates, there are no additional sections for goals, habits, or anything else. Download one or several and start planning away!
Download horizontal weekly planner templates
Up until now, all the PDF planner templates we provided were vertical. Here is the selection of horizontal weekly planners.
The well-thought-out layout makes it easy to scan through the entire week. All important things are highlighted. With these free printables, you will remember everything you need to do during the week.
Download hourly weekly planner templates
If you are a busy bee with tons of daily and weekly tasks, you know too well how easy it is to mess up and lose a task or two in the chaos of life. Free hourly planners will help you prioritize the things you need to do first by placing them strategically.
Every weekly hourly planner is undated and is broken into one-hour intervals, so you can start working with it whenever you prefer.
Tip: Find out your peak productivity hours and schedule top-priority stuff during those time slots. To identify those best hours, watch yourself for a couple of weeks and note when you feel most motivated and during what hours of the day you seem to be very efficient. Many people find that early mornings are the best for deep focused work, while others enjoy the quiet hours in the evening. Don’t follow anyone’s example, though. Make sure that you find your peak work hours, no matter how inspiring someone else can be with their routine.
Planning tips: making the most of your weekly planner template
Congratulations! You’ve downloaded your weekly schedule planner and are ready to seize the day. But before you do that, have a quick look at our five tips that will help you make the most of your planning sessions with the weekly calendar template.
#1 Start with a brain dump
A brain dump is a practice when you take a piece of paper or open a waiting list in your Bordio online to-do list app and write down all your ideas, thoughts, goals, dreams, tasks, and obligations.
The key is to do this for every area of your life and try to really write down everything. The goal here is to literally dump everything out of your brain and save it up somewhere.
This practice is a great way to reduce stress and anxiety, but also helps you become more accountable and achieve your goals faster. When we have hundreds of things on our minds, we struggle with remembering them all and either forget something or get really frustrated. Both outcomes are not great for us.
Once you have the full list, go through it and see what tasks should be worked on in the near future and schedule them. Also, check if something can be delegated or even removed from the list.
For example, if you’ve planned to study French for seven years but haven’t started yet – perhaps it’s not something that you really want to do after all.
As for the rest of the tasks, go back to the list as often as you’d like or once a week to check if any of the tasks there can be scheduled into the upcoming week. So you always can use online schedule calendar makers to plan comfortably.
#2 Prioritise the tasks you have for the current or following week
It helps to set up weekly goals and prioritize your tasks with those goals in mind. For example, your main goal for the year can be to launch a lifestyle YouTube channel and reach 100K subscribers, but if your final exams start next week, then your weekly tasks should probably center around studying, and not filming and editing videos.
To start, think back about all your commitments and their deadlines. Select the tasks that have to be done to complete everything. Then look through the list of those tasks and identify top and bottom priorities.
Tip: When prioritizing, consider the estimated time it takes to finish tasks. If there are four tasks that have medium importance but only take 20-30 minutes each, you might choose to sort some of them out before starting with the 8-hour study session for one of the university subjects.
#3 Work with top-priority tasks
Top priority tasks should always be completed within the deadline or as close to it as possible.
Theoretically, we all understand that the higher the priority, the more focus on it you should have. However, urgent last-minute things come up and take up our time, leaving our top priorities undone.
If you don’t pay attention, it’s easy to find yourself lost with seemingly many things done, but nothing truly important accomplished. Make sure you consciously try to work on the most important things before dealing with anything else.
If you struggle with key tasks, do some extra work to ease it up for you:
- Break large tasks into smaller ones or create subtasks.
- Identify dependencies between tasks and subtasks.
- Plan your work (with dependencies in mind) in a way that there is minimal downtime.
- See if you need more information or help from someone else to progress with the task and be proactive about it.
You won’t be able to focus on key priorities only 100% of the time and that’s okay. Just make sure you pay attention to this and do your best to minimize the busy work that doesn’t generate that much value but makes you feel like you’re doing something.
#4 Always schedule key priority tasks first
Our energy is not endless, so when you list your daily activities in the weekly planner, it makes sense to start with the key priority tasks first, while you’re still motivated and productive.
Put crucial tasks on top of your list and then allocate urgent stuff. When something is urgent, we often confuse it with the most important work. However, more often than not, urgent tasks are not important at all long-term.
Tip: As you reach the non-important and non-urgent tasks on your weekly planner, see if you can outsource them. If we pay too much attention to such tasks, we risk never getting the top stuff done.
#5 Don’t over plan your days
It’s good to be ambitious, but if you try too hard and overdo it, you have a good risk of falling into procrastination and self-deprecating.
Having too much to do to the point where you know you won’t be able to accomplish everything is not fun.
Many successful people with a busy schedule swear by the top-3 rule, where they set themselves three critical tasks for the day that they absolutely must complete. Once those are out of the way, they are free to pick anything from their to-do list to work on.
That way, they get the work done, feel accomplished, and have the energy to work on less critical stuff too.
Final thoughts: the role of planning in productivity
Productivity has become a buzzword over the last couple of decades, with millions of people striving to become better with their time and more productive as a countermeasure to the seemingly ever-increasing speed of life.
Although being productive and organized is very desirable, many still fail to achieve their goals and targets. There are many reasons why that can happen, but we believe that not using the right tools is one of the greatest obstacles on the way to success.
You won’t be saved by printable weekly planners alone, but they will contribute greatly to your progress if you use them regularly.
Planning allows you to create a framework – a structure that you can rely on. James Clear has famously said in his best-selling book Atomic Habits: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems”.
A system will help you get through the tough times when motivation doesn’t work. And the system starts with planning.
