Visualize your week in a dynamic and engaging way
Use this framework to plan a week. This can be especially useful to have a place to plan your time at work without having to create events in your official work calendar.
Creating a weekly planner should be structured and calculated. Simply downloading everything you do during the week onto a calendar may demonstrate how busy you are, but it won't help you attain any progress in your week.
A good rule of thumb is to divide your week into the days when you are most productive and days when you need a little more freedom in the schedule.
For instance, some people like to jump into Mondays head-first because their energy and enthusiasm are high. Others may not like to load their Fridays with heavy tasks because the likelihood that you can’t complete or follow up on a Friday task is high.
The next step is to add tasks to your weekly planner. Use a sticky note to show a 30-minute time block for meetings and use different shapes to denote longer periods of time. This will help you quickly visualize how much of your day will be spent in meetings.
Pro-tip: Only add tasks to your weekly planner that can be completed within the week. Putting a task down that has an unclear or rolling deadline only ensures that you’ll ignore it when other unscheduled problems arise. You can save long-term projects for a monthly or even a yearly planner. The goal is to only include tasks that you know can be accomplished in a week.
Mural’s sidebar is filled with additional features, like images and icons, that can enhance your weekly planner. You can use preloaded images from the Mural library or download your own. Put a picture of a cake for a staff birthday as a quick visual reminder of what’s on your schedule.
To get the most out of your weekly planner template, you should:
Mural has a simple shortcut to duplicate events using one key. This will allow you to duplicate the note when a meeting goes longer or you need more time for a task.
Mural's share feature enables you to share your weekly planner. You set the roles you want collaborators to have, like admin and core team members who have full collaboration access, including the ability to change and modify docs. You can also grant restricted access to external guests or visitors. A shared weekly planner will alleviate a lot of the guesswork about your schedule. Sharing your weekly planner can reduce miscommunications among your teams as well.
Get a hard copy of your schedule to keep with you when you don't have access to your computer. This is also useful when you have limited access to the internet and can't log in to your account. You can also select a specific area of your mural to export using the crop tool in the export menu.
A weekly planner is a visual schedule of your upcoming tasks segmented by the days of the week. It can serve as a mix of a to-do list and a journal. Generally, you write your task on the day you intend to fulfill it, accompanied by a brief description of that activity. A weekly schedule is helpful in giving you a visible list of your plans day-by-day and can also be helpful to others who might want to schedule time with you.
Almost anyone can benefit from using a weekly planner. Most often, however, people with heavy meeting schedules or busy lifestyles need the organizational stability that a weekly planner provides.
If you find you have a large amount of work that never seems to get finished, weekly planning can help you prioritize tasks throughout the entire week all on one page. You can also use a weekly planner to track habits and weekly goals.
Life happens — things change — schedules often have to be rearranged. A weekly planner is not set in stone. It should be a living document that changes according to what you need to accomplish. That’s why you should always put down tasks that are essential first and color code them if need be. That way, you can always move blocks of time around those tasks and reschedule anything else less vital.
Mural is the only platform that offers both a shared workspace and training on the LUMA System™, a practical way to collaborate that anyone can learn and apply.