Lots of college stores sell weekly planners to help you get organized, and with a busy life, organized you must be. In picking your student planner, I present these tips:
- Be prepared to blow some money. Chances are you’re going to be keeping this thing for a year, so don’t be stingy. Inexpensive doesn’t always imply bad quality, but it’s usually a damn good indicator.
- Gridded, lined, or blank. You are much better off delineating the structure of your own planner than buying a pre-structured one. Don’t torment yourself with stupid preallocated spaces for days and weeks. I personally prefer gridded pages because they encourage use of grids and tables in addition to higher character density in your writing.
- Check the binding. Ideally, the pages should be sewn in signatures (groups) of 2 to 6 pages. Avoid composition-style bindings where all pages are sewn through the fold in one fat signature. Avoid spirals and combs. The rectangular shape of the case binding is a classic, and for good reason.
- Use and abuse. Before you make your purchase, think about how a planner will fit into your current life. It’s not just a notebook: it’s a life-organizer. Hard-cover leather is an excellent and durable choice, but plaid, cloth-bound ones are more forgiving of scratches. Find a place to keep it, whether in your bookbag or a pocket, and use this to determine your planner’s size. I use Pilot G-2 0.38mm black ultra-fine pens to annotate my notebook. They write sharper and firmer than ball-points and are very accommodating of small writers.
- Freedom comes a week at a time. The advantage to making your own free-form agenda is that you can adjust it to your own lifestyle. My weekends are generally bookends to the week when I can catch up on leisure activities and creative creations, so my planner is split into weeks. Sometimes, my notes spill over into following pages, or a schedule continues over weeks. You bought your freedom, use it.
- Finally, remember its purpose. It’s tempting at the start to begin filling in the pages with more and more entries: birthdays, final exams, and soon it deviates into self-reflection and personal commemorations. A busy planner indeed looks better, but don’t just fill it with junk. A strong planner will instead encourage you to fill your life, and not just your pages, with interesting people and activities.