Your time in college can be fun but if you’re not careful, it can be stressful, confusing, and overwhelming.
One of the reasons for this is that you don’t have a reliable way to get organized, and you are not using an academic planner that works specifically for your study life.
We’ll cover the different types of academic planners and include links to specific ones so you can explore your options for the academic year ahead!
Let’s start with the basics:
What Is an Academic Planner?
An academic planner is a tool that will keep you organized and help you perform better in school while making sure you have time for fun.
It’s a personal planner you can use to:
- Keep track of due dates for assignments
- Plan out studying for exams
- See your class schedule
- Have all assignments in one place
- Estimate how long your tasks will take
- Plan ahead for group projects
- Know if you have enough time to get your studying done on time
- Plan When to work on Which assignment and for How Long
Now keep in mind, not all planners will give you all these options.
Why Should I Use an Academic Planner?
The most common reason for using a study planner is to manage your time and have more time for what matters to you.
That could be anything from hanging out with friends, working a job, being more active in your community, or even getting some extra studying done.
What Are My Options When It Comes to Academic Planners?
There are THREE main options when it comes to picking a study planner and all have different advantages and disadvantages.
Let’s go through what’s available while assessing their pros and cons and why one of these planners beats them all.
Paper Planners
So you just got yourself one of these fancy, lay flat paper planners with a fun layout on each page.
It includes anything from weekly planning pages, monthly calendars, note pages, productivity pages, and inspirational quotes to keep you motivated and organized.
Compared to other types of planners, using a paper planner as your academic year planner is beneficial because:
- No distractions. When planning your week/month in a paper planner, it’s harder to get distracted by messages or notifications than having a planner on your phone, meaning that you can easily focus on your work.
- Good for recalling information later on. When you write something down by hand, there is some evidence to suggest you’ll remember it better.
Cons:
- It is time-consuming. Imagine having to manually start from scratch every week or month when re-creating your schedule or copying your entire semester’s schedule by hand instead of having AI do that automatically for you.
- Accessibility problems. One of the biggest problems that come with using a traditional academic planner is not being able to access your schedule or your notes when you don’t have it with you.
- Mistakes are harder to erase and take more time than just deleting or editting something on your phone or computer.
- It’s not very “smart.” A paper planner will not do any calculations of available study time and will not give you insightful analytics about your study progress
- Ink bleeding/ghosting. This is a common problem and it occurs when ink seeps through on the other side of the paper, making it hard to write on the next page. Wasting more paper!
If the Cons aren’t enough to deter you from purchasing a paper planner, here is a list of the best ones: