How To Set Up a Digital Planner

Welcome to the new school year! We have a whole new collection of Blog posts, resources, and more coming your way to make sure you don't wing it this school year, but we wanted to start with the basics. The best way to stay on top of your assignments, activities, and commitments this year is with a planner, and we're going to show you how to set one up so that you can feel ready for the week every week.

Get familiar

We'll be modeling on our new Simple Weekly School Planner, but you can take this advice and use it on any other planner you find!

First, get familiar with your planner. Before you start filling things in, look at what all the sections are. See if they fit your needs and will actually help you this year, or if it's just going to make you more stressed. Also, if your planner comes with a template page, make sure to make a copy of it so that you're editing your own planner, not a master document. Once you like your planner and know what all of the parts are, then move on to the next step.

Start with context

Before you begin putting in information or events, know where you are. Look for some sort of metric that tells you the day, week, or month so that you can visualize each and every day. If your planner doesn't come with it already filled in, then fill that section in first. For us, that means completing the calendar for the accurate month.

Plan the big things

Once your calendar is filled in, look for other "big things" to do before getting to the minor details. On our planner, that means filling in the Upcoming Events section and the To Do List section. That way, you know what non-assignment activities and occurrences to be aware of for the week ahead.

Fill out your assignments

Now, you'll do the biggest chunk of the planner: your actual assignments for the week. For this section, there is no specific way to do it; just add in all of the columns of information needed for each assignment. The Days Left column will auto-populate, and a completion pie chart will appear next to the calendar after filling in the Status column.

All the other pieces

After you've done your assignments, fill out all the other missing pieces. On this planner, pre-plan your Homework for the Week by assigning certain tasks to certain days. This will help you visualize your nightly workload and creates a mini, day-by-day checklist.

Now, your planner should be complete! If it's a weekly planner like ours, make sure to make a copy of the template page every Sunday or Monday morning and set it up the same way we did here. Go have a great school year, and if you liked this, be sure to check out our other posts below or in the Blog page.