Weekly Planning: How to Stay Sane With 100+ Tasks

Can you turn a mess of 100+ random tasks into a system that actually works? Yes. How? Weekly sprints powered by the PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act). All the details — and a real-world test drive — below.

• Why a Weekly Plan Specifically
• Step 1: Get Everything Out of Your Head Before Planning Your Week
• Step 2: From Chaos to Order With Weekly Scheduling
• Step 3: Test Your Weekly Plan With the PDCA Cycle
• Quick-Start: Your Weekly Planning Algorithm

Why a Weekly Plan Specifically 

Let’s be honest — we’ve all tried different approaches to organizing our tasks:

• Daily to-do lists, a.k.a. the nightly ritual of “move it, move it, move that one too.”
• Grand monthly master plans that start strong and end... well, they don’t really end, do they?
• Those January 1st resolutions — lose 30 pounds, learn Spanish, get that promotion, and finally start meditating. All at once. Starting Monday.

And every time, something went sideways.

Let’s unpack why.

A day is tactics without strategy. Sure, daily lists work. But only at the operational level: “reply to emails,” “3 PM standup,” “pick up groceries” — you check things off and feel good. But the moment you add something like “write the Q3 department strategy,” it gets pushed to tonight, then tomorrow, then the heat death of the universe. Because the urgent always wins over the important.

A month is strategy without flexibility. On the other end of the spectrum — monthly planning. You map out all 30 days: goals, milestones, color-coded markers. Week one goes great. Week two, your boss drops a new project on you. Week three, your kid comes home from school with the flu. By week four, all that’s left of your plan is the memory of making it — and a nice serving of guilt.

A week is the sweet spot. Enough time to make real progress without losing control. And here’s the thing:

• The world already runs on weekly cycles — Monday standups, Friday reports. It’s the natural rhythm of work. Lean into it.
• A week is enough to move a big project forward — draft a chapter, prep a product launch. You won’t finish it, but you’ll make a meaningful dent.
• There’s room to maneuver — Tuesday or Friday can go off the rails and “burn,” but the week still holds together. A month is too vague, a day is too rigid, and a week is just flexible enough.

Weekly planning isn’t a silver bullet. But if you:

• juggle multiple projects at once,
• keep missing deadlines because of “surprises,”
• can’t remember what you accomplished by Friday afternoon,
• dream about yoga / the gym / that online course but “there’s no time,”

then weekly sprints might be your lifeline.

And if you layer on the PDCA cycle, every week becomes an experiment: plan → do → check what happened → adjust your approach. No guilt about what didn’t get done — just data to improve the system.

Ready to see how it works in practice?

Step 1: Get Everything Out of Your Head Before Planning Your Week 

First rule of the anti-chaos club: your brain is designed to process information and make decisions, not store task lists. If you keep your entire to-do list in your head, all your mental fuel goes toward just trying not to forget things. The fix? A total brain dump — transfer every task, thought, and commitment from your head into an external system.

Let’s walk through how to do this in SingularityApp.

1. Run a Brain Dump

   The goal is to get absolutely everything out of your head. Don’t organize, don’t prioritize — just capture. In SingularityApp, you can do this several ways:

   • Type it out — open your Inbox and create tasks one by one (the “+ New Task” button or keyboard shortcuts).
   • Dictate it — in the mobile app, hold the add button and speak your tasks.
   • Via Telegram — add the bot and send it tasks as messages (the bot drops them straight into the app).
   • By email — send messages to a special address, and they automatically become tasks.

   Sarah went with the classic approach and cranked out 43 tasks in 20 minutes — from “code review for Project A” to “finally book that dentist appointment.”

2. Create Structure With Projects

   After the brain dump, you’ve got a pile of disconnected tasks. To see the big picture, you need structure. In SingularityApp, you can create projects for the main areas of your life.

   Sarah created 4 main projects:

   • Work (red) — everything professional
   • Family (green) — kids, school, shared plans
   • Home (yellow) — household, repairs, errands
   • Personal (purple) — health, learning, downtime

   Inside each area, you can create sub-projects for specific goals. Under “Work,” Sarah added sub-projects for Project A, Project B, and Project C. Under “Home” — a sub-project for “Bathroom Renovation.”

   

   Not everything needs its own sub-project. One-off tasks like “call Mom” can go directly into the parent project (Family) or into a “No Project” section.

3. Add Tags for Quick Filters

   Tags are flexible — you can use them in all sorts of ways. One powerful approach: quick access to specific tasks and grouping by context or action type.

   For example, a #buy tag pulls all your purchases into one place — the teacher appreciation gift from “Family,” the dog food from “Home,” and the new faucet from “Bathroom Renovation.”

   Sarah created these practical tags:

   • #buy — all purchases
   • #call — phone calls (great for batch calling)
   • #urgent — burning deadlines
   • #discuss_with_Mike — questions for her husband
   • #at_office — can only be done on-site
   • #at_home — only doable from home
     

   

What you’ve got after this step: a clear system instead of a pile of tasks. Projects and sub-projects show what you’re working on. Tags help you instantly find tasks by context. Now you’re ready to move on to actual weekly planning — slot tasks into days, get everything done (well, probably), and keep your sanity.

Step 2: From Chaos to Order With Weekly Scheduling 

So you (and Sarah) have a bunch of tasks organized into projects and tagged up. But technically, it’s still just a list. To turn it into a real weekly plan, you need to figure out which tasks go where. Here’s the step-by-step.

1. Separate the Fixed From the Flexible

   Fixed tasks are tied to a specific time — meetings, deadlines, kids’ activity schedules, doctor’s appointments. Flexible tasks can be done any day, any time — clearing your inbox, grabbing groceries — as long as they happen this week.

   Sarah went through her 43 tasks and identified the fixed ones:

   • Project A release — Monday 2:00 PM
   • Parent-teacher conference — Tuesday 6:30 PM
   • Plumber — Wednesday 2:00–6:00 PM
   • Prototype deadline — Thursday by 5:00 PM
   • Son’s karate — Mon, Wed, Fri at 5:00 PM
   • Daughter’s piano lessons — Tue, Thu at 4:00 PM

   Daughter’s piano lessons — Tue, Thu at 4:00 PM

   The remaining 30+ tasks turned out to be flexible.

   

2. Prioritize the Flexible Tasks

   Not all flexible tasks are created equal. Be honest and sort them into three buckets:

   • Critical — if this doesn’t get done this week, there will be real consequences.
   • Important — needs to happen, but the world won’t end if it slips a week.
   • Nice-to-have — would be great to get to, but it’s not a priority.

   For Sarah, “critical” included: find a front-end developer for Project B (or the next sprint is blown) and schedule the kids’ dentist appointments (slots fill up fast). Under “important” — pay the utility bills (the late fee kicks in on the 10th, though the penalty itself is tiny).

   Yoga and a haircut landed in “nice-to-have.” Reality bites.

   
   

3. Заполняем календарь

   Now the most important part — strategically distribute all your tasks and build out the calendar. Here’s how:

   • Reality-check your fixed task durations — is the parent-teacher conference really just an hour? Set a realistic 1.5–2 hours (what if there’s a heated PTA fundraiser debate?).
   • Find the gaps between fixed blocks — drag your critical flexible tasks into those windows.
   • Distribute important tasks — into whatever time slots remain after fixed and critical items.
   • Always leave buffers — at least 20–30% of your time for the unexpected.

   Here’s how Sarah’s week shaped up:
   Monday: Between the morning standup and the 2:00 PM release, she has 3 hours — that’s for sourcing the front-end dev. Tuesday: Morning is free until noon — code review and progress report go there. Wednesday: 2:00–6:00 PM is blocked for the plumber. All the important work shifted to the morning; the afternoon is remote-only tasks.

   

What you’ve got after this step: a structured weekly plan. Now you can see what’s realistically doable and what’s better off postponed — instead of trying to cram 10 pounds of tasks into a 5-pound bag.

Step 3: Test Your Weekly Plan With the PDCA Cycle 

The calendar is filled, priorities are set, buffers are in place. But we all know what happens next: life has other plans. To fight the entropy, we’ll use the Deming Cycle, a.k.a. PDCA.

1. Plan — done in the previous step.

2. Do — execute tasks, take quick notes.

   

   Sarah’s expectations vs. reality:

   • Monday: The release went smoothly, but sourcing the front-end dev ate 5 hours instead of 3.
   • Tuesday: Daughter was under the weather — piano canceled. But that freed up a window for the report.
   • Wednesday: The plumber was a no-show! At least Sarah had already set up to work from home — but the day was mostly a wash.
   • Thursday: Fire drill — the client suddenly requested prototype revisions.
   • Friday: Scrambling to close all the loose ends. Yoga? What yoga?

3. Check — a 20–30 minute Sunday evening review. This is an honest debrief of your week. Important: the retrospective isn’t about beating yourself up — it’s about collecting data to improve the system.

   

4. Act — draw conclusions and set new rules. Make adjustments based on your analysis and write down new rules for next week. The best way? A note right inside SingularityApp.

After a few weekly PDCA cycles, your planning system starts adapting to real life. You’ll stop thinking an hour means 60 minutes of pure work and start building in buffers for context switching. You’ll learn your own productivity patterns, and the “nice-to-have” list will stop being a graveyard of broken dreams.

What you’ve got after this step: weekly planning that’s become a living system — one that adapts to your life. Every week is an experiment that makes the next one more effective.

Quick-Start: Your Weekly Planning Algorithm 

For those who want to start right now:

1. Open SingularityApp and do a total brain dump — everything from your head into the Inbox.
2. Create projects for your main life areas (work, family, home, personal).
3. Distribute tasks for next week using the guide from Step 2.
4. Run a retrospective on Sunday.

Sure, the first week will be far from perfect. The second one, too. But with each PDCA cycle, the system gets better at matching your actual life. The key is to start.