How I Organize My Planner

This post is both a follow-up on my How To Survive College-series, and something of a reply to a post by Kayla Blogs on how she organises her planner, specifically for school-related things.
As you’re going to be seeing in this week’s weekly list, I love everything organising, and especially everything planner-related – like, I have a whole board dedicated to it on my Pinterest, and I’m pretty sure it’s the one with the most pins!

Anyways, Kayla basically has this whole system with colour coding (and we all know that colour coding is my personal form of therapy) where she has one colour per course, and so on and so forth (definitely go read her post if you want to hear more about that!)

My system is kind of different, which – for some reason – I figured would be a good thing to mention to her:

So, you know, I figured – why not?
So here’s a post on how I organise my planner, and how I colour code the daily part from my planner!

Here’s something you should know: every single year for the past 6-or-so years I’ve tried a different type of planner and never once did I actually find one I really liked – or even one that I actually could use completely – so I ended up just making one myself this year – from scratch – drawn by hand – completely…
(what can I say, I needed something to do during my study breaks while I was retaking my summer exams…)

Anyways, in this home-made thing, the very first page has my weekly schedule – only classes though:

Basically, I’m always forgetting where my classes are taking place, so I really need this in there – at least this way I can always look it up 🙂

The next section of my planner consists of a list of all the assignments I’ve gotten – this way, I don’t just write them down on the day that I got them (or on the day I’m supposed to hand them in), but I can actually easily see them all together, in one easily reachable list!
(Why I do it this way? Because way too often in my first and second year, I would suddenly realise I had to hand in an assignment the next day only because somebody else mentioned it – exactly because I had only written it down on a random day which I would then never go back to look at!)

The last specifically school-aimed section I put into my planner, was a file for every course I’m taking with just the basic information on it: what’s the name of the course, what/which professor(s) give it, how can I contact them, where and when do classes take place, which manuals and/or set reading are we supposed to buy, what is the exam going to be like (it’s so often that professors will mention something random about this, and I’m just sitting there like “well, that’s good to know, but how on earth am I supposed to remember that?” This is how! I write it down here!), etc.

As you can see, for some courses, there’s quite a bit more information to write down than for others, but at least this way, I can write it down!

Of course, we’re talking planners here after all, there’s the actual ‘agenda’ part of my planner.
I chose to do a weekly view, just because (again) that allows for easier access to all the information at once – this is just about the most basic week, there was just about nothing going on there…

The basic lay-out is just 7 columns, one for each day, with on the right a separate column with my, more general TO DO-list for things I need to do that week – usually this ends up being where I note down what groceries I need to get (for some reason I always end up thinking of that in the midst of classes).
Oh, and it also has the list of assignments that are coming up, in the next couple of weeks, so I know what things I need to get started on:

All the way at the bottom, there’s a section for notes – mainly just random stuff I think off, be it books I want to re-read, or people I need to mail or call, and so on and so forth…

Now, why have I opted to adapt “colour coding” like this? Because my courses are always at the same time, I don’t need to know so much when I have any type of due date for a certain course (because that’s just always on the day that I have the course) but what type of deadlines I have on any given day – so that I can try and compensate by doing some of that work more beforehand (especially where the huge amounts of essays I’ve had to write the past semester!)

Anyways, there you have it, how I organise my planner – are there any similarities with how you do it? Be sure to let me know below!

-Saar