People buy planners with the intent to get more organized. However, planners can easily become bogged down with sticky notes, loose pages, and wear and tear, which detracts from their initial purpose. Additionally, as schedules become busier, planners can often become cramped, making them difficult to read. Because of this, it’s important to develop a strategy for keeping your planner structured, preventing your organizational tool from becoming cluttered and setting you back.
Make a Careful Planner Choice
The most important step when developing an organizational strategy is choosing the right planner. If notes are an important part of your planning process, choose a planner that has plenty of margin room to add notes and bulleted lists. This prevents your planner from getting overtaken by sticky notes and loose pages that can easily be lost or overlooked when reading your daily planner. It can also be beneficial to seek planners that have extra notes pages at the back for additional planning and list-making that may not fit in the margins of the planner. Maximizing writing room should be the top priority in ensuring your planner will stay organized. Additionally, it is important to buy a planner with a sturdy design to keep it looking pristine. This includes protective covers, high-quality paper, and strong binding to ensure that you planner will not succumb to the wear and tear of everyday life.
Developing a System for Recording Tasks
When you have selected the right planner for you, you have already tackled the toughest part of keeping an organized planner. However, if you don’t have a system when filling out your planner, it will easily become cluttered in spite of your efforts to buy the right product. Developing a color-coding system for your planner can help you stay organized. Whether you color-code tasks by subject or due date, this can prevent tasks from bleeding together. It is important to maintain a consistent code throughout the planner, though. Making a key within the planner can help with this to allow for easy reading and validate that the coding system is simple enough to follow through on. Three to six colors is an ideal target to maintain simplicity in your system and provide optimal organization. Finally, it is important to mark off your tasks as you complete them. Whether that be drawing a checkmark next to them or crossing them out when they’re done, it’s important that you know which tasks you have completed and which still need to be done.
Set Aside Time to Upkeep the Planner Each Day
However, it can be easy to get behind on filling out your planner, which decreases the utility and organization of it. To avoid this, it is important to fill out your planner with routine tasks for an extended amount of time after getting it to provide a baseline for staying organized. From there, you should set aside time each day to check your tasks and make sure everything is up to date. If it’s possible to write down tasks as soon as you get them, it will be easier to stay on top of your schedule. Investing small amounts of time in your planner each day will be beneficial in the long run and allow for a more organized lifestyle.
The variety of school and annual planners at datebookstore.com are a good place to start the process! Browse our product lines to find the planner that will best suit you.
