Welcome back to another episode of Caroline trying to maintain the illusion of productivity even though her actual productivity is kind of sketchy! So glad you could join me. Basically, I’ve been switching up how I organize and plan everything out over the past year, so I wanted to share an updated planning/organization post. I used to only use a paper planner because it’s pretty inconvenient trying to keep track of assignments electronically during in-person school, but due to the pandemic and online school, I’ve transferred a lot of my planning system online. I’m going to take you through how I organize all of my school, work, and extracurricular things, so whether this gives you inspiration, helps you learn more about me, or is just simple entertainment, I hope you enjoy this post!
Paper Planner
The original planning system. I got this planner from Amazon, and it’s been working really well for me. The planner comes with a relatively large space for each day, which is great, but I also add a couple of customizations to better fit my school schedule. With a black pen, I write each of the numbers 1 to 7 next to a line, which corresponds to the assignments for that class period. For example, all the assignments/tests next to the number 4 are for my chemistry class. Whenever I receive an assignment or due date, I’ll write that assignment in the corresponding line. If I don’t have homework for a particular class, I’ll write a dash in that line. For example, on Monday of this week, I didn’t have any homework for periods 5-7.
In the first few lines of each day, I’ll put standard to-do tasks, such as working out. Right next to the date you’ll also note that there are B’s and R’s, which correspond to A days and B days that my school has because we do block scheduling. Labeling which days I have which classes just helps me stay on top of things, and it also helps me keep track of which days we may have holidays or modified schedules. At the beginning of each month, I’ll go in and write down the B’s and R’s for each day of the following month as well as write the numbers 1-7 next to the lines to prepare for the coming weeks.
Finally, let’s talk about the color-coding. You’ll notice that certain items are highlighted, and those just help me get the most important things straight. Pink is for tests/project due dates, orange is for school/work events or meetings, and yellow is for important items (ex: high-priority homework assignments). Blue and green aren’t seen on this spread, but they’re for birthdays and social events, respectively.
Apple Calendar
Next, let’s go over my calendar. I’ve started to use Apple Calendar for time-blocking because I found that with online school, I had a lot of assignments but also much longer periods to get them done. When I saw a huge list of assignments for the weekend on my to-do list, I would get super overwhelmed, but when I laid out what I would be doing when it was a lot easier for me and my anxiety. And thus, the time-blocking craze began.
I use Apple Calendar for my time-blocking because I can open it directly from my laptop homepage instead of having to wait for Google Chrome to load. And, in the rare case that I use my phone for planning, I can see my schedule on my phone too. Apple Calendar has a day, week, month, and year view, but I like using the week view the most because I can see a few days in the future and it requires less scrolling back and forth. I color-code my school, work, and miscellaneous tasks (green for school, purple for work, and blue for misc/home), so I can differentiate between everything going on. I feel like time-blocking is pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll usually plan out my days well in advance. For example, I’ll plan out my entire weekend on Thursday so I don’t have to worry about it later and I can guarantee that I’ll get all my weekend tasks done.
Notion
Finally, let’s do a little Notion tour. I use Notion mainly for list-making and content planning because I used to plan things out with Google Docs, but I thought it was kind of inconvenient and I wanted everything to be in the same place instead of in four separate documents. Also, Notion has been trending lately, and I wanted to see what the hype was about instead of constantly asking myself “what if I started using Notion” for the next eight months until I finally gave in. My Notion has a decent amount of features that I feel are kind of hard to explain with photos only, so I’ll be doing a little video tour!
PS: This is the template I mentioned from twirlingpages; she made a YouTube video on how she uses Notion, so if you're interested you can check that out!
That’s everything I use to plan out my life! Thanks for reading!
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