How To Plan Your Week Using Monday.com

Time management is the method of organising and actively managing the amount of time spent on particular tasks to maximise performance and productivity. It’s all about meeting your objectives while adhering to time limits and a sense of urgency. A task management software, such as Monday.com, acts as a daily planner, allowing you to organise your daily tasks. Monday.com users can achieve optimum efficiency while still concentrating on their quality of life.

In this article, you can learn how to plan your week using Monday.com so that you can be as efficient as possible.

Why Is It Necessary to Plan Your Week?

Planning is important because it allows you to make the best use of your time. You should guess how much work you can get done and how much time you have available. This way, you will feel accomplished in knowing that you met your goal. It will also allow you to decide how much work you can reasonably do in the time available.

This will also help you build a sense of achievement once you have achieved your goal. Setting aside time on Sunday evenings to review your weekly and monthly objectives is the most successful way on how to plan your week.

How To Create A Weekly Work Schedule

Start Brain Storming

Your brain is juggling a plethora of tasks—projects to complete, projects to remember for later, people to contact, random one-offs—you name it. Additionally, you have a slew of non-work-related responsibilities and minimal distractions to think about.

Take a blank sheet of paper and jot down everything that comes to mind that needs to be done. Not just the tasks at hand for work or right now—everything. Remove everything from your head and onto the page.

Plan Your Weekly Schedule

Conduct a thorough review of your new list and indicate when each item must be completed. Be brutally honest with yourself regarding this. There may be some tasks that you believe you must complete today or tomorrow, but ask yourself: Should you know how to plan your week?

If it is necessary for you, then take note of it. However, if you have a little more wiggle room, avoid putting yourself under unnecessary pressure to complete it sooner than necessary. On the other hand, avoid rushing everything.

You may be tempted to take one of the two paths. Either you complete everything immediately out of a sense of accomplishment, or you believe you have more time than you do and end up rushing at the end. In both cases, you’re setting yourself up for failure and adding unnecessary stress to your life.

For long-term projects that do not require a deadline, one of two things should be done: Assign them an ideal “start by” date to ensure they get done or create a separate page for low-priority, nice-to-have projects.

Schedule It In Your Calendar

After assigning a due date to each, schedule them all on your calendar. This is where a project management system truly shines. Additionally, you can customise your board by adding time tracking, dates, subitems, and other feature-rich columns.

Do not fret about items that are not due this week. Simply incorporate them into your larger, all-inclusive to-do list, which you can refer to each week as you plan. For tasks that must be completed this week, write them down on the day they are due, along with the amount of time required for each. This will help you account for any additional meetings and ensure that you have enough time to complete everything on your to-do list for the day. 

As a bonus, try overestimating the time required for each task. Allow 45 minutes if editing a memo normally takes 30 minutes. You’ll want to factor in additional time in case you’re interrupted or the task takes longer than anticipated for any reason.

Avoid cramming your schedule to the brim. Each day, leave some space. This planning strategy will give you the flexibility you need to respond to emergency calls, sick days, and project roadblocks, among other things.

How To Stay On Track With Your Weekly Schedule

A new habit takes approximately two months to develop (according to James Clear of Atomic Habits). Here are some tips for maintaining accountability until this new routine becomes second nature.

Make use of a template

Decide on a regular day and time to perform it. It should function identically to a recurring meeting on your calendar. You can either do it at the end of each week to prepare for the next or at the start. Some people schedule their weeks on Sunday evenings but it’s entirely up to you to determine what works best for you.

Therefore, schedule it for a time that you believe you will be able to adhere to. This process takes approximately five minutes. To begin, set aside 20 minutes and observe how that goes.

Create recurring reminders and/or alarms

If you’re using a digital calendar, configure the reminder function, which may include a pop-up notification on your phone or an email trigger (or both). Utilize technology to keep this task at the forefront of your mind each week as you establish this as a habit. Another option is to set a recurring reminder on your phone, which is particularly useful if you’re still using a paper planner.

Inform others of your actions

When you communicate a goal to another person, it becomes more real and significantly increases your accountability. Therefore, inform someone you regularly communicate with about it—your best friend, your spouse, your favourite coworker, or your boss. Again, choose what is most convenient for you. Even if they never inquire about it again, simply speaking it out loud to them will aid you in adhering to it.

Introducing Monday.com’s My Week Tool 

Monday’s My Week is an excellent way for you and your team to see everything that needs to be accomplished this week, next week, or even what is past due. It works by aggregating all tasks due in the current week across your monday.com account. This feature gathers all tasks assigned to you and/or your team members across your account. My week is structured around tasks assigned via the People Column. To maximise the efficiency of this feature, we recommend creating a Date or Timeline Column for each task on your boards. By default, when you click on my week, you’ll see all of the tasks assigned to you for the current week.

Find out more about Monday.com’s My Week Tool here.

My Week’s Schedule Features

Date Format

You can choose whether to view deadlines or tasks with dates that are not in deadline mode in the My Week settings. To accomplish this, switch between “Only Deadlines” and “All Dates.”

Assignments that do not have a due date

While some tasks will not require a deadline or a date, maybe you’d still like to see them in the My Week view to stay organised so this has been added as a setting as well. Tasks will indicate whether the board contains date columns with blank values or none at all.

Filter the information displayed in My Week

Maybe not all of the items in My Week correspond to your upcoming tasks. If that is the case, you can hide specific boards that can become overwhelming if you are a member of several. You can now choose to hide tasks from particular boards if you don’t want them to appear in My Week. Simply click on the eye icon next to any assignment on a board to hide it.

Final Thoughts

You will improve your productivity by making a weekly work schedule. It will allow you to be much more productive each week (and day). As a result, starting next week, schedule five to twenty minutes every week to prepare your schedule. When you realise how much this strategy will help you approach your workload creatively, you’ll be glad you took it. It’s past time to get serious about completing tasks. We have put together a comprehensive review of Monday.com, check it out, here.