How to Organize My Week

Organizing your week successfully can help you reduce and manage stress as well as ensure that appointments or important tasks are accomplished in a timely manner. The process should include both your personal and your worklife projects to give you a manageable "map for success" that prioritizes the most important activities during your week and also allows for the unexpected things that pop up. Successful time management is about being honest with yourself and setting realistic expectations. The well-organized week hinges on good time management.

Things You'll Need

• Yearly calendar with a "week-at-glance" sheets
• Pencil
• Highlighter pen

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Instructions

• 1

  A list will help you prioritize and estimate time-lengths of tasks.

  Make a list of priorities for the week on a separate sheet of paper that is categorized by subtitles, such as work, family, personal. If you're using only an electronic/web-based calendar like iCalender, go to the "Notes" app to make your lists.

• 2

  Highlighting the daily tasks makes it easy to transfer them to your calendar.

  Mark the items on your list with the highlighter pen that need to be done on a daily basis. In your electronic/web-based app, mark the daily items with a star or change the font color to denote daily task.

• 3

  Number each of the items in the subcategory "work" in their order of importance. Number one should be the most important task to complete and the last number on the list should be the least important task to complete. Finish by numbering the personal and family subcategories the same way.

• 4

  Recording your daily top priorities i

  Take the top three priority items from each subcategory that are also highlighted as daily tasks and pencil them in on your calendar in their consecutive days. In your electronic calendar, choose "new event" and enter the priority items on their dates, setting notifications for any item that needs one.

• 5

  Make sure your daily calendar space is adequate for notations.

  Record or enter the remaining top three to five priority items from each of the three subcategories on the days they need to be done.

• 6

  Personal time for yourself can be anything you enjoy that is de-stressing.

  Evaluate the tasks scheduled for each day to ensure that you haven't over-scheduled a day or your week. If you have time left over and can add in additional items on certain days or even as a low-priority daily task, consider adding in what makes sense. Remember to prioritize some downtime for yourself each day.

• 7

  Check off completed tasks from the priority list so they don't get added in to the next week's schedule.

  Add two or three "flexible" tasks at the bottom of each day just in case you have extra time one day and want to take on something you normally wouldn't be able to get to. Having a go-to list of flexible additional tasks will save you time, keep your priority tasks on target and prevent indecision on what other tasks you might have time to accomplish.

• 8

  Keep your priority list of tasks and refer to it at the end of your week to make the next week's priority task schedule. In your electronic calendar, you can simply drag the events that reoccur the next week into the following week on their correct day.