Writing
How to plan a week across several projects without losing one
Why the usual advice — one list, ruthless prioritisation — breaks down when you are running three things at once, and what to do instead.
Last updated: 5 min read
Most productivity advice assumes one job. Prioritise ruthlessly, do the most important thing first, say no to the rest. That works when the things competing for your week are interchangeable.
They are not interchangeable when they belong to different projects. Skipping a client deliverable is not the same kind of decision as skipping this week's newsletter, and putting them on one list forces you to compare them as though it were.
The failure is invisibility, not laziness
When you run several projects, the one that quietly dies is rarely the one you decided to drop. It is the one that stopped appearing. A single flat list surfaces whatever was added most recently or shouted loudest, and a project with nothing urgent in it this week simply stops being visible.
Two weeks later it is behind, and the reason is not that you deprioritised it. You never saw it.
Give every project a column
The fix is structural rather than motivational: lay projects out side by side so an empty one is visibly empty. A grid with projects across the top and channels down the side does this without any effort on your part — a project with nothing in it this week is a column of blank cells, and that is uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
This is the whole reason a matrix beats a list for this problem. Lists hide absence. Grids show it.
Plan the week, not the day
Daily planning across several projects turns into daily context switching. A better unit is the week: decide on one day which projects get real time, put those blocks on the calendar, and let the days follow from that.
The check that matters is not whether you finished everything. It is whether anything you scheduled never got done, and whether any project went a whole week without a single scheduled block. Both are quiet failures that a to-do list will never report.
Batch what actually moves together
One piece of work usually produces several deliverables. An episode becomes a clip and a newsletter. A feature becomes release notes and an announcement. These are not three tasks that happen to be related — they are one thing with three outputs, and they should move as a unit when the date changes.
That is what Polylane calls a linked batch: schedule any one of them and the rest follow. It removes the most common source of a slipped week, which is moving the recording and forgetting that the announcement was pinned to it.