Weekly To-Do List: A Template and a Weekly Review Habit

A weekly to-do list is the work you have decided to do in the next seven days, written on one page and rebuilt once a week. It works because a week is long enough to finish something real and short enough to plan honestly. Keep it to three outcomes that matter, a handful of smaller tasks under each area of your life or work, a section for what you are waiting on, and a “not this week” section for everything else. Then protect twenty minutes at the end of each week to review it and write the next one. The template, a filled example and the review are below.

If you need the basics of writing a good task line first (a verb, an outcome and how you will know it is done), the task list template covers that. This page is about the week: what goes on the list, and the habit that keeps it true.

A weekly to-do list template

Copy this into a notes app, a text file or a paper notebook. The sections are in the order you read them on a Monday morning: what matters most, then everything else, then what you are deliberately not doing.

# Week of [Month day, year]

## This week's three outcomes
1. [Verb + outcome] — done when [ ]
2. [Verb + outcome] — done when [ ]
3. [Verb + outcome] — done when [ ]

## Fixed points
- [Day]: [meeting, deadline or appointment that shapes the week]
- [Day]: [ ]

## Work
- [ ] [Verb + outcome]
- [ ] [Verb + outcome]

## Home and money
- [ ] [Verb + outcome]

## Waiting on
- [ ] [What] — from [who], asked [Month day]

## Not this week
- [Anything real that can wait]

## Review notes (filled in on Friday)
- Finished:
- Carried over, and why:
- Change for next week:

Three sections do most of the work. The three outcomes are the reason the week exists; if all three get done and nothing else does, the week was still a success. Fixed points are the days you cannot use, so you plan around them instead of discovering them on Wednesday. And “Not this week” is where good ideas go so they stop competing with the work you have chosen.

A filled example week

# Week of October 5, 2026

## This week's three outcomes
1. Send the Q4 proposal to Lakeside Dental — done when it is in their inbox
2. Send the September invoices — done when all five are sent and logged
3. Ship the new booking form — done when a test booking reaches the calendar

## Fixed points
- Tuesday: client workshop, 9 a.m. to noon
- Thursday: school pickup at 3 p.m.

## Work
- [ ] Draft the October newsletter
- [ ] Reply to the three support emails about late orders
- [ ] Update the onboarding checklist for the new hire

## Home and money
- [ ] Book the furnace inspection
- [ ] Cancel the unused design tool subscription

## Waiting on
- [ ] Signed contract — from Marcus at Lakeside, asked October 1

## Not this week
- Redesign the pricing page
- Look into a second shipping carrier

Notice the size of it. Eight tasks plus three outcomes is a real week for most people with a job, meetings and a household. A weekly list with forty lines is a backlog wearing a disguise, and by Wednesday it mostly tells you what you will not do.

The 20-minute weekly review

The list is only as good as the moment you rebuild it. Pick a fixed slot, Friday afternoon or Sunday evening, and make it a recurring event in your calendar↗ (opens in a new tab) so it is not left to memory. Then run the same five steps every time:

1. Look back (5 minutes). Tick what is done and read it. Write one line under “Finished.” Starting with what got done is not a pep talk; it tells you what a week actually holds.
2. Clear the edges (4 minutes). Empty your inbox flags, sticky notes and the notes app into the list as raw lines. Anything you promised someone in a meeting goes in now.
3. Decide on the carry-overs (4 minutes). For each unfinished line, choose: carry it, shrink it, move it to “Not this week,” or delete it. Write why under “Carried over.” A task carried three weeks running is a decision you have not made.
4. Look ahead (3 minutes). Open the calendar for the next seven days and copy the fixed points across. Check the “Waiting on” list and nudge anyone who is late.
5. Write next week (4 minutes). Choose the three outcomes first, then the smaller tasks, and stop when the week looks full rather than when the list runs out.

This is a shorter cousin of the weekly review in David Allen’s Getting Things Done method, which the GTD site describes↗ (opens in a new tab) in three stages: get clear, get current and get creative. The full version takes longer and covers every project and someday list you keep; Getting Things Done on a kanban board maps it to lanes. The twenty-minute version trades completeness for the one thing that matters most: doing it every week.

Two habits keep the review short. Write task lines that need no decoding later; the federal plain language guidance on digital.gov↗ (opens in a new tab) recommends active voice because it makes clear who should do what, and that is exactly what a Friday-afternoon you needs from a Monday-morning you. And never let the review become planning the next quarter. If a bigger question comes up, write it down as one line for next week.

Weekly to-do list vs daily list

The weekly list is the plan; a daily list is a slice of it. Each morning, copy up to three lines from the weekly list into today, and leave the rest alone. People who keep only a daily list tend to plan by whatever is loudest that morning. People who keep only a weekly list tend to drift until Thursday. The pair works because the week sets the direction and the day sets the next step.

When to move from a list to a board

A weekly list is enough while one person does the work and a line is either done or not. It starts to strain when the middle matters. The Kanban Guide↗ (opens in a new tab) puts “defining and visualizing a workflow” first among its practices: a list shows two states, a board shows every step between them. The signs you have outgrown the list:

• Carried-over lines pile up and you cannot tell which were started and which were never touched.
• Someone else edits the list, and you keep asking who is doing what.
• The weekly review takes forty minutes because you are reconstructing status from memory.
• An AI assistant does part of the work, and its changes should land in the same place, signed as its own.

The full comparison is in Kanban board vs to-do list. If you would rather stay with a list and just want a better app for it, the best to-do list apps sorts them by who shares the list. For a board you run alone, with its own weekly review, see personal kanban.

Running the weekly list on a fenbs board

On fenbs, the weekly list becomes four lanes: To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed. The three outcomes and the week’s tasks go in Next Up, everything under “Not this week” stays in To Do, and the review starts from Completed. A few specifics:

• Add many turns the pasted list into tasks, one per line, with a preview before anything is created. Start a line with bug:, feature: or enhancement: to set its kind; the rest take the kind chosen for the batch.
• Priority runs from 1 to 10, where 1 is the most urgent, so the three outcomes can be the 1s and 2s and the rest sort below them.
• Copy as Markdown copies the whole board back out as text, lane by lane, which is a ready-made starting point for the review notes or a weekly status report.
• History records who changed what, so if an AI assistant connected over MCP moved a task during the week, the review shows it.

What fenbs does not do matters for a weekly habit: there are no due dates, reminders or recurring tasks. The calendar event is still what brings you to the review, and the template above is something you paste in again, not something fenbs repeats for you.