By Tiffany Xu, Staff Writer
How useful is a planner? A planner is a notebook that acts as a personal organizer with an agenda with pages to write down everyday tasks and events. There are pages containing yearly, monthly, and weekly calendars. Some fancier planners even have extra blank pages, an address book page, and pages for notes. The compact size of most planners makes it effortlessly easy to bring it around everywhere you go. With the world beginning to open up and everyone returning back to school, daily life has gotten busier than staying at home for online school. Planners are a very useful tool now that everyone has much more activities to attend to. Not only do planners help with tracking your schedule and tasks, they also help with your health and reaching your goals.
Planners can help with staying on track. The detailed pages of a section for each day can come in very handy for assignments and tasks from school or other places, such as outside work and tutoring places, chores, and any extra tasks you would want to get done during the day. Writing things down in your planner can help you make sure you always stay on task and focus on finishing all your assignments. For bigger events such as upcoming tests, due dates, hanging out with your friends, or even appointments, you could use the monthly calendar to write it down so it is easier to remember. This way, even if you forget when your doctor’s appointment is, you’ll always know that you can look back at your planner. Writing down your everyday errands can also make you more organized and can enhance your productivity and time management. Time management is key in life, especially in high school, because time is limited, and a lot of activities need to be finished. Before having a planner myself, I would go through each class mentally, figuring out what work I’d have to do before going to school the next day. Sometimes, this wouldn’t work; I’d forget my homework and due dates. Now with a planner, I can always stay on top of things and can stay organized.
Not only do planners help with planning out activities but they also have some health benefits. You can keep track of your physical health like diet and exercise. This also includes scheduling doctor appointments, or even making sure you get enough fresh air and sleep. Health benefits also include mental health. Most planners also contain a journaling page, and here, you can write all your thoughts which can reduce stress and anxiety. When I get stressed, I like to write down everything I want to do so I don’t have to think about it and start multitasking. Multitasking like this gets messy, and I end up getting nothing done. If this is the case for you, planners can be very beneficial for you, and I definitely recommend that you get one All people have goals, including myself. Sometimes, we get lazy with our goals and end up not reaching them. It is often said that if you write down your goals, your commitment to them increases. It improves your focus on the goals, which make them achievable. You can write down your progress, which can get you more motivated as you check on how far you’ve gotten.
There are limited things you can do in a day, but with a planner, you can do much more efficiently and get more done out of each day. You feel better and you procrastinate less. After using planners for a while, you can start to develop good habits, such as being productive, making sure tasks have been completed well, and more. Planners are also not expensive at all which make it super affordable and easy to use on the go.
