What to Include in a Weekly Planner: 12 Sections and Layouts

What to include in a weekly planner comes down to three layers: the fixed dates and deadlines of the week, a plan for each day, and the home and personal side of life, such as habits and meals. Most people need a main task and priorities for each day, an hourly schedule, a task list and a place for due dates, then add habits, a meal plan or a grocery list as their week requires.

Below are 12 weekly planner sections with what each one is for, three layouts compared, and a quick way to decide which sections your week needs.

What to Include in a Weekly Planner: 12 Sections

You do not need all twelve. Read what each one does, then keep the ones that match problems you actually have.

Sections That Frame the Week

1. Key dates. Birthdays, holidays, appointments and school events. Enter them once and they are in view before you plan, so a Thursday birthday does not surprise you on Thursday. Add a day of lead time where it helps: a birthday card needs buying before the birthday, not on it.
2. Weekly goals. Two or three outcomes that would make the week a success, such as “finish the grant draft” or “clear the garage”. They decide what gets the best hours.
3. Due dates. Deadlines that fall this week: bills, assignments, forms, renewals. Keep them apart from tasks, because a due date cannot move and a task often can.
4. Task list with priorities. Everything you need to get done this week, each marked high, medium or low. Include tasks that can happen on any day, so they get picked up when a slot opens. A good test: if every high task got done and nothing else, would the week still count as a good one? If not, your labels are off.

Sections That Run Each Day

5. Main task of the day. The one thing that makes the day a success if nothing else gets done. Our guide on how to prioritize your day shows how to choose it.
6. Daily priorities. Two or three more things, with a box to tick. More than three and the list stops being a priority list.
7. Hourly schedule. One row per hour with a type for each block (work, family, exercise). This is where the main task gets its time. See our time blocking examples for four filled-in days.
8. People to contact. Calls, texts and emails you owe, each with a word on why: “Dentist, move the appointment” or “Sam, send the photos”. Listing them in one place lets you batch them into a single block instead of scattering them through the day.

Sections for Home and Yourself

9. Habit tracker. Daily yes/no habits, weekly habits and measurable ones like pages read. Keep it beside the schedule so a skipped habit sits next to the day that crowded it out. Our list of habit tracker ideas has 70 to choose from.
10. Meal plan. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack for each day. Deciding once on Sunday removes a daily “what’s for dinner” question. The meal planner with grocery list shows both on one page.
11. Grocery list with quantities. Built from the meal plan. Quantities matter: “chicken thighs, 2 lb” stops you from buying twice or running short midweek.
12. Gratitude and notes. One line a day about what went well, plus space for notes. These notes are raw material for your weekly review.

Which Weekly Planner Sections You Need

Match the sections to your kind of week. Start with the core four (main task, priorities, tasks, due dates) and add from there.

Your week	Add to the core four	Skip or shrink
Office job with meetings	Hourly schedule, people to contact, weekly goals	Meal plan, if you eat out at lunch
Parent running a household	Key dates, meal plan, grocery list, hourly schedule	Weekly goals: one family goal is plenty
Student	Hourly schedule for classes and study, weekly goals	People to contact, grocery list
Freelancer	Hourly schedule, people to contact, habit tracker	Gratitude, if you never fill it in
Minimal planner	Gratitude	Everything else

If a section stays empty three weeks in a row, remove it. An unused box is clutter that makes the useful ones harder to find.

Weekly Planner Layouts Compared

The same sections can sit in very different layouts. These are the three most common.

	Vertical (day columns)	Horizontal (day rows)	Dashboard (sections)
How it looks	Seven columns, hours run top to bottom	Seven stacked rows or boxes, lined space	A week strip plus boxes for goals, tasks, habits and meals
Best for	Time blocking, appointment-heavy weeks	List makers, short journaling	Households, people running several areas at once
Strength	Every day’s hours side by side	Plenty of room to write	Everything for the week on one page
Trade-off	Narrow columns for long notes	No hour grid, so time is harder to see	Less space for each day
Best-fit sections	Hourly schedule, main task, priorities	Tasks, notes, gratitude	Meal plan, grocery list, habits, key dates

Many planners mix two layouts: day columns for the schedule, with dashboard boxes below for habits and meals. Our weekly planner spreadsheet works this way. Each day gets its own column with a main task, priorities, an hourly schedule, tasks, habits and meals, and the grocery list and gratitude sit on the same weekly page. It covers six consecutive weeks from the start date you choose.

Weekly Planner Layout in Google Sheets or Excel

A vertical layout takes about ten minutes to set up yourself.

1. Dates across the top. Type the Monday date in B1. In C1 enter =B1+1 and fill right to H1. Both apps handle dates the same way.
2. Show the weekday. Select B1:H1 and apply the custom number format ddd m/d, which displays “Mon 9/28”. In Google Sheets it is Format > Number > Custom number format; in Excel, Home > Format > Format Cells > Number > Custom.
3. Label the rows in column A. For example: row 2 Main task, rows 3 to 5 Priorities, rows 6 to 20 the hours from 7 am to 9 pm, rows 21 to 28 Tasks, rows 29 to 32 Habits.
4. Freeze the headers. In Google Sheets, choose View > Freeze > 1 row, then View > Freeze > 1 column. In Excel, select B2 and choose View > Freeze Panes > Freeze Panes.
5. Add the home sections. Put the meal plan in rows below the habits and the grocery list in column J, so everything prints on one page.
6. Copy the tab for next week. On the copy, replace B1 with a formula that points at the previous tab, such as ='Week 1'!B1+7, which works in both apps.

To put this layout to work, read how to plan your week, which walks through a 30-minute session that fills each section in order.

A last tip: before you add a section, name the problem it solves. If you cannot, leave it out and see whether you miss it after two weeks.