Carrying a Planner
I had plenty of opportunities to use a planner throughout elementary school. But they never once stuck. I had teachers that required them and parents had to sign them each night. They ended up being an extra chore, a piece of homework that didn’t help me get any better at the subject.
One day, as a Junior at UVU, I realized that I needed to use a planner. There was too much to hold it all inside my head. However, for me they had never worked. I lost them, set them aside for months and all the dates I had filled in were no good, or carried them around in my backpack without ever actually pulling them out to be used.
Something drastic needed to happen if I was going to make use of a planner. What on earth would keep me constantly updating and referring to it? I threw away my wallet.
I made a trip to Staples and sought out something specific; I wanted a planner that would take the place of a wallet. That way I would need to take my planner out every time I needed to buy a snack or gas, access a building with RFID, and even make sure I had it in order to legally drive. It has been right next to me ever since. So my first bit of advice to the world about using a planner is to make it impossible to live without from day one.
Planning your semester
This part is the easiest and the hardest. It’s easy because you don’t really need to make many decisions. It’s hard because it will take you quite a bit of time doing a fairly mindless task. Abraham Lincoln supposedly said "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” So you need to put in some serious time to sharpen your ax. Here’s how.
At the end of syllabus week, sit down with each syllabus from each class. Generally speaking, the syllabus will contain a list of every assignment and its due date. If not, you probably have a course calendar in your student portal. The first step is to copy EVERY assignment into your planner on its due date. For every class.
Guess what! Now you’re basically going to do the same thing again. Except you will start at the end of the semester, and work your way backwards. Start with the last assignment that will be due for the whole semester. Figure out what day(s) you will work on that assignment. Fill that in on the respective days. If you have a big paper due at the end of the semester, schedule 1 hour twice a week for the whole semester, for example. If you have a math assignment due the day after you covered it in lecture, write in your planner that you will do it the evening it was assigned. By the end of this, you will know when you will complete each assignment for the whole semester, and when to turn it in.
This is magical. You will feel like you have fewer assignments to do over the course of the semester. One of my clients literally ONLY CHANGED THIS about how they approached school. Halfway through the semester they told me that they had "never stayed caught up the whole semester, much less actually gotten ahead in any classes.” Thanks to sharpening their ax like this, this client was TWO WEEKS AHEAD at the time. By the end of the semester, they had unlocked two brand new "achievements.” 1. It was the first time they passed every class they took. And 2. It was their first 4.0. And that was with LESS STRESS than any semester before.
Using a Planner for School
So you made it this far. But a giant wallet won’t do you much good if you aren’t using it to plan. Life is dynamic, so my next advice to you is this: Have your planner open to today’s page any time you sit down. While in class, you should have a notebook out for keeping up with course content. Your planner should be out for course administration. It is there for anything you need to know that will not be on the test. This assignment got canceled. The rough draft is due Tuesday. No class on your professor’s birthday. Take this extra credit survey. Download that software. This will keep you from ever having to say "I missed that that changed.”
When you sit down to study, it is the first thing you pull out to check. You will open it to the current day and first check on what needs to be turned in today. It should be done because you planned to do it when the semester started. So all you need to do is either submit it, or check to make sure it was submitted previously. BAM. Nothing late. Ever.
The next thing to do is check on what assignments you planned to do that day. Then do them. Some will be completing a portion of a large assignment, then setting it down after a certain amount of time. Others will be to plow through a worksheet on something you went over in class that day.
I was helping a family friend with some academic research recently. My job was to go through scientific journals and write a research paper. I had been working on it in chunks for two months, and sat down to write a summary to update the person with whom I was working. I compiled a lot of notes and sources, and copy/pasted my work into a single document. The day they wanted it, I planned to add my citations and send it over.
I figured half an hour would be sufficient, as it hadn’t typed that much. Funny thing is, I’m still not done adding the citations because it turns out that I had written 6 pages, single spaced, size 11 font. That would have been about 12 pages had I been using MLA format like your college professors probably want. I thought I had a page and a half. Since I had worked on it in chunks over the course of two months, I didn’t realize how much I had actually completed. It is fully the length of an average published scientific article, and it was just piecing it together a few minutes at a time. I had planned to put in just an hour here and there across the entire time.
Fill in Everything Else
After all of your assignments are in the planner, both when they are due and when you will do them, you need to add in all of your other obligations. Fill in your work schedule, church activities, special events, study time, down time, class schedule, exercise, meals, and Dr. appointments. If it takes up time, write it in. Life has surprises, so I recommend pencil for this part. Spend some study time doing this every week. You will feel so much LESS BUSY but get so much MORE DONE.
If you would like to use the same planner I do, it can be purchased by copy and pasting this Amazon Affiliate link (Advancing Academics will receive a portion of all sales). https://amzn.to/3C1rZLy
