Using A Rolling Task List To Prioritise Your Week

The Productivity Series: Busy Doing Nothing

Welcome to our series of blog posts where we will explore a range of productivity and time management techniques and how to implement them within your journal or planner. Check out our other posts here.

You have a long list of tasks, but how do you go about organising them across the week?

The rolling task list method might just be perfect for you!

What is a Weekly Rolling Task List?

The Rolling Task list begins life as a traditional task list, with items added in no particular order. What makes this list special is that it has columns on one side that represent the days of the week.

Once you have your list of tasks. go through and highlight the day that you plan on completing it. This could be with a tick box (as in the image below), a highlighter, or pencil dot.

Once your tasks have been allocated across the week it is very simple to scan down each day’s column and see what you need to get done.

Where did the idea originate?

Our weekly rolling task list is very much inspired by the Alastair Method, a way of organising your future log or projects in a listed format.

The benefit of the Alastair method is that you can add items to your future log or task list at any time, and schedule into a month/week/day depending on how your list is set up.

Benefits of the Rolling Task List:

The biggest benefit of this method is that you can add to your list as you go along, giving it great flexibility.

Each time you add a task, schedule it across your week!

What if you don’t complete all the tasks within a particular day?

If you don’t complete the task on the day set, migrate it to a new day. At the end of the week, migrate any tasks that are left into next week’s list!

Setting up a Rolling Task List in your journal:

In the example shown above I have used our functional Washi tape to add the check boxes and days of the week. You could simply write this with a pen, or use our Super Easy Sticker Sheet to add a list quickly to your journal!

You have your Brain Dump, what’s next?

Now you have your Rolling Task List, how do you motivate yourself to move through the tasks?

Over the next few weeks we will be exploring different strategies for productivity and time management, as we move towards the dispatch of our next Quarterly Subscription Box – “Busy Doing Nothing”.

Find out more about the Busy Doing Nothing here!