I really enjoyed writing about money saving for students which was slightly more informational and it seemed to be fairly well received so I figured I would spread some more of my wisdom (if you can even call it that). I wanted to talk about how I use my planner.

As a university student, I think organisation is absolutely key to success (perhaps in life as well as in university) and I would be completely lost without my planner.

I got this as an early Christmas present in September before I started university, it’s the Filofax A5 The Original in dark aqua (available here *) and oh my goodness I love it. I wanted an A5 organiser because I needed space to be able to write all my various tasks and appointments and whilst it’s a little too large to carry in a handbag its perfect to pop in my uni bag and take with me to my lectures and seminars so I can write down any homework assignments. It’s a really sleek design and despite constant usage this year it is not showing any signs of wear and tear. So whilst it is a bit on the expensive side for a planner, you can add your own inserts so it will last year on year and I truly do intend for this to be a planner to last a lifetime. I also think that having a planner you really love will make you more inclined to actually use it, especially if you’ve spent a lot of money on it.

Because I’m a bit of a control freak, I chose not to use the inserts that came with the planner, they might work for you but for me they just didn’t quite give me the space I needed to plan and keep track of everything I wanted to keep track of. After trawling Etsy for planner templates I decided that the only way I would be able to get the exact layout that would work for me was by making it myself. I decided I needed a page for each day and each page needed four sections; work to do, other to do, appointments, and notes.

Obviously, if you are going to make your own planner template then you can choose whatever sections you want and adjust the sizes of each section to what you think you will need. Another key advantage to making your own template is that you can change it midway through the year if certain things aren’t working for you. I only like to print off one term’s worth of pages at a time, so I can change my layout every term if I think of new things I want to include.

I decided to keep the layout of the page quite clean, I didn’t want to print loads of decoration onto the page. Instead, to keep it interesting I decided to buy some cheap stickers off eBay which I put on the pages wherever I fancy (you can see the cute little bus sticker on the page above).

The printing process was a little complicated and required some trial and error (which I think will vary based on your printer) but I eventually managed to print my pages so they were doubled sided and I had four days on a sheet of A4. I set it up so that in groups of 4, day 3 was on the front left side, day 1 on the front right side and then day 2 was on the back left side and day 4 was on the back right side. I then printed double sided, flipping the page on the short side and this seemed to work for me.

So that’s how my planner physically comes together. Now, how do I organise the tasks I have within it? I tend to put all the tasks I need to do for the whole week down on a Monday so that everything is in one place and I can see how busy my week is going to be. I then like to write in my appointments and deadlines on the days that they will be so that I know how much time I have spare to work independently. As an English student, most of my course does revolve around independent study so it’s really important for me that I know how much time I have and can set myself appropriate goals. I’m going to talk a bit more about goal setting in a moment. What I like to do next is transfer certain tasks onto certain days, if I move something off the Monday list to another day, I’ll cross it off the Monday list. When a task is completed fully I will tick it off. Differentiating between tasks I’ve moved around and tasks I’ve completed in this way helps me to clearly see what still needs to be done and what I have postponed. I think this is one of the basic principles in bullet journalling as well, although correct me if I’m wrong.

As you can probably tell, I don’t make a massive effort to be neat in my planner. I’ve never been the sort of person that needs to have everything beautiful and colour coded and for me I feel like this wastes more time than it saves, I’d spend longer organising than I would actually working. I also like to fold over the corner of the pages at the end of the day, it means I can quickly flick to the current day and see what I have to do. Personally, speed and ease are the two key points in how I like to plan.

I also keep a list at the back of my planner of all the official assignments I have to hand in. I do actually like to colour code this according to which month its due in, as I get given all of these deadlines at the very start of term. This leads on really nicely to what I wanted to say about setting goals. If I put these big assignments in as they are in the main body of my planner, I don’t think I would ever get them done. Within what can be written as one single assignment, there are several different phases and steps I need to do, from researching, to planning, to drafting, to editing, to submitting. I believe that if you write these smaller tasks in your to do list for the day then you are much more likely to accomplish them, as they’re much more manageable. I also (as sad as it may be) get a great deal of satisfaction out of ticking off tasks, the smaller chunks I can break my assignment into, the more ticking off I get to do. It’s a little thing, but it helps me to stay motivated.

Overall, I think its important to tailor your planner to what works for you. I like to use stickers and scrawl messily in my planner, but if you want beautifully designed pages with neat colour coded tasks then do that! I hope this post has at least given you some ideas as to which direction you can take your planner in and how simple it really is to customise it all to suit you.

How do you like to keep organised? Or do you think excessive planning leads to less time actually doing? Let me know what you think in the comments xoxo

Twitter

Instagram

*Disclaimer: this is an affiliate link which means I get a small fraction of the sale of this item, but all opinions are my own and not sponsored