Planning for a productive week

It’s the first Monday of June!

Did you know I love the start of a new month? I’m all about that monthly goal reset, and I’m always making tweaks to my productivity systems whenever I feel like I’ve stopped making forward progress.

I love my bullet journal for making lists and taking notes, but sometimes the bigger projects (like writing and editing a novel) get lost in the day to day grind. It’s way too easy for me to get distracted by crossing admin tasks off my list and forget about the big stuff. Especially when it’s just one bullet point among many.

So I came up with the idea to use a little dry erase board on my desk to keep my project tasks top of mind.

Each week, I load it up with all the bite-size tasks that make up whatever project I’m trying to complete that week. Each task is meant to be something I think I can do in thirty minutes (aka, a “sprint”). Then, each morning, I pick four tasks to move to the “Today” section of the board. Once I start a task, I move it down to the “Started” section. And once it’s done, I move it to the “Done” section. At the end of the week I toss the “Done” tasks and reset the board for the new week. It’s very satisfying.

This week, I’ve set up my board with one task sticky for each chapter of Petals and Runes. The project goal for this week is to complete my read through and collect all my revision notes. Ideally, I’m going to focus on reading and making notes, not on actually revising.

I’m not really sure if it’s going to take me a full week to get through this, or not. Every book is different. Sometimes this process goes really fast. I suspect that, since I haven’t been back in this world for a while, this is going to be pretty slow. I think I’m going to have to stop frequently to make notes as I read.

Also, this isn’t the only thing I’m doing this week. In addition to this writing project, I have a lot of other publishing admin tasks to do related to the Ash of the Fae release on the 21st, plus my usual household stuff to do. I’m keeping track of all that stuff in the weekly spread in my bullet journal. So, I think allocating a whole week for this part of the revision process is a realistic estimate.

How about you? How are you keeping track of your to-do list this week?