Weekly team planning: a simple routine that holds all week.

What a weekly plan is for

A weekly plan answers three questions: who is working on what, who has room for something new, and which deadlines this week are at risk. It does not need to say what each person will do at 2 PM on Thursday. Trying to plan that far ahead in hours usually produces a plan that is wrong by Tuesday and ignored by Wednesday.

The routine below keeps the week at the level of days and half days. Hours are decided the evening before each day, by the person doing the work (the daily planning guide covers that part).

Before you start: three inputs

1. Who is available. List time off and holidays for the week. Nothing breaks a plan faster than booking someone who is away.
2. What is due. List every deadline that falls in the week or early next week.
3. What is ongoing. Retainers, support, and maintenance work that needs some time every week.

The routine

1. Place deadlines first

For each deadline, decide who is doing the work and give them enough full or half days before it. Be honest about how much time it needs. If it does not fit, you have found the most important conversation of the week, and you have found it on Monday.

2. Add ongoing work

Give ongoing work its regular slot, for example every Friday afternoon for support. Recurring slots make the week predictable for clients and for the team.

3. Keep some room

Leave at least one half day per person unplanned, or planned for small requests. New work always arrives; a plan with no room has to be rebuilt every time it does.

4. Share it

Put the week where everyone can see it, and talk through it briefly. People should leave knowing their main project for each day. If someone outside the team needs to know when their work is scheduled, share only that: who is on which project on which day.

5. Review on the last day

At the end of the week, spend ten minutes looking back. Which deadlines held? Where did the plan break, and was it a surprise or something you could have seen? Anything unfinished either moves to next week deliberately or is dropped. This review is the best input to next week’s plan.

Signs the routine is working

• People rarely ask “what should I be working on?”
• New requests are placed in hours, not debated for days.
• Deadlines that slip were flagged early in the week, not on the due date.
• The weekly plan and the daily plans mostly agree.

Common problems

The plan is too detailed. If it takes more than half an hour to make, it is probably planning hours, not days. Step back to days.

Nobody looks at it after Monday. Connect it to the daily plan. When each person’s plan for tomorrow starts from the week, the week stays alive.

Work keeps sliding. If the same task moves from week to week, it is blocked, unclear, or not actually important. Decide which, and act on it.

Doing it in Stoa

Stoa’s week board follows this routine. Managers place people on projects by full or half days, with time off and team holidays shown. Each person’s plan for tomorrow is pre-filled from the week. Unfinished work can go back to the week at the end of a day, and a read-only link shares the week with people outside the team, without task titles or hours.

You can run this routine with a whiteboard or a spreadsheet too. If you would like the week and tomorrow in one place, Stoa has a 14-day free trial; see the pricing page for the plans.