How to Use Rolling Weeks
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July 10, 2016
Notebook Review: Rhodia Soft-Cover
July 17, 2016
As I pulled together my Bullet Journal Glossary post, I got familiar with some techniques that other people are using – including the Rolling Weeks.  This is new to me, though probably not new to others, but I wanted to give it a try.  Today I’ll talk about what it is, how I’m setting it up, and why it might work well for you.
ROLLING WEEKS IN YOUR BULLET JOURNAL
As you know, I am an avid weekly gal.  I think too much in terms of future tasks that I usually have a robust weekly set up to organize my chaos.  This week, I’ll be at a conference for work, meaning my schedule is very different, less rigid, and much more emergent.  I figured I’d give this a shot.
Why use rolling weeks? In Ryder’s original system, he focuses on rapid logging day to day, meaning you’d take up as much or as little space as you wanted.  The goal was to just organize your work and thoughts in a clear and quick way.  The biggest hang up for people is that they like to know what’s coming up – for me, I know it helps me prioritize, prepare, and get ready.  The rolling weeks is the best of both worlds.
You can watch the video to watch me set it up as well as give some other tips (honestly it’s much easier to TELL you than write about it), but here’s my write up how you set it up.
First, decide if you want a small row up top or column on the side of the page.  I’m still using my weekly habit tracker, so I wanted to line up my column to be that same width – it’s quite a bit wide compared to others, but that’s part of the experiment, right?
Then I just divided up the days – for consistency I just made it the same height as my tracker stamp to get a 5-day forecast. Â Some want to see a full 7 days out ahead, so just divide it up for your needs.
Since I will be starting to use this spread on Monday, I started labeling the boxes Monday through Friday.  In these boxes I will fill in schedule things – for me this will mean which conference sessions and events I’ll attend, and return flight information. If there’s a few key tasks for those days, I’ll add them there too.
The rest of the spread is used for Dailies, ala the original bullet journal system. So I mark Monday for the start of my daily log, and will jot down whatever tasks or notes I want to add. Â So you just continue using the daily log like normal until the page runs out.
Here’s the rolling part: Say I end my spread with Wednesday. I’ll turn the page and set up another rolling week, divide it into 5 days.  Then, I’ll start marking the column starting with Thursday, and forecast 5 days ahead.  Then I’ll continue daily logging with Thursday.
This is why it’s a nice combination of forecasting/future planning without sacrificing what people love most about the bullet journal – the flexibility and flowing nature of the dailies.  Are there some redundancies? Yes, you might have to copy over some of the days if you don’t get to them during that spread, but probably not by much for the added benefit of a quick look ahead.
I’ll have to report back on how I liked it after this week – but I have high hopes for lighter weeks like this that it will work perfectly!  Are you using this technique?
Yours,
Jessica
14 Comments
This is great, thank you for sharing! Rolling weeks was one of the things I wanted to try out after your glossary post, so this is perfect. I uise weekly spreads right now, they just work the best for me as I like to know what’s coming up. This seems like a good alternative. Now I just have to put it into action 🙂
Yes I tried it and it was OK – I definitely missed some of the other structures I learned to add to my usual weekly, specifically the expense tracking and the gratitude log. So… if I did it again I’d have to figure it out! Have you tried it?
Maybe you could do the rolling weeks and still keep your other weekly trackers? I’m not sure how to do it either. I haven’t tried it yet myself, I’m going on holiday this week, so it didn’t seem like the best week to experiment, but the plan is to try it next week. But like with you I don’t know where I would keep my trackers!
Right?! I think I’d have to like… cut down the lines I’d write on, and just have a short-hand to make it less wide? I’m torn! Did you figure out a different way to experiment with it? I don’t want to cut my pages!
Hi 🙂 I tried the Rolling Weeks for a few weeks now, and I liked it. However I didn’t manage to figure out a way to include my weekly trackers in a good way. I did try to do it with post-it notes one week, and moved it to the new spread. But I like flipping through and seeing old trackers and the post-it’s doesn’t look as nice as writing into my journal. I think I will go back to my weekly layout now 🙂 But it’s good to try new things, right? 🙂
Yes it was worth the shot, and maybe you’ll figure out the right ways to tweak it for you
This maybe exactly what I’ve been looking for. I have been playing around with a weekly insert and didn’t like it, moved to a daily insert but miss seeing a week at a glance. This maybe the answer. Always enjoy your videos
You are wonderful, thank you for your words! Have you tried it? I like that it’s kind of a middle of the road compromise.
I never thought about this layout! I tried multiple times to use a weekly layout on one page (similar to Kara’s one), but it ended up being covered by other pages as soon as the week progressed being out of sight and out of my mind, like the monthly layout (that I abandoned for the same reason). But, in addition to my trusty Google Calendar, I was looking for an analog way to see more days at a glance, so thank you for the inspiration!
Yes I’ve tried Monthlies so many times and… never took. So this might be a good compromise 🙂
I love this idea. I guess it feels to me like a very-near-term analog of the Future Log, and especially useful for non-optional activities scheduled for a specific date or having a hard deadline. I wonder whether to include very regular meetings, &c — and whether the rolling week will be useful if I don’t.
Only one way to find out!
Yes!! I love when people dive in and try things – I would predict that if I knew those meetings by heart, I wouldn’t put them into the rolling week but include the things that are one-offs that I need special tasks to prep for, if that makes sense!
[…] you saw, I tried the Rolling Week layout during a lighter week.  I had a conference that week so I knew that I’d have some events to […]
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