A New Year of Learning: Which Planner?

A well prepared student knows at what time which lesson starts in which room. It’s not only a good thing to be in the right place at the right moment, it’s also good to be prepared for what’s going to happen. To bring the right materials and notes from the week before.

But that’s only one reason to have a good planner. Another one of course is to write down all assignments and their deadlines. It sounds so simple, but I’m amazed by the amount of students who neglect to write down this kind of useful information and then ask their teacher later on “Oh, what was it we had to do this week?”. They’re not leaving a good impression.

Flexibility is key

One very important feature of a planner should be the possibility to input data in every possible situation. We need to be able to get an appointment, reminder or deadline into the system immediately without having to remember to write it down or to write it on a piece of paper and put it on the calendar when we’re at our computer. So the work you do and the situation we’re in might influence our choice. It’s best to find our own favorite tool and adjust it to fit our needs if necessary.

So what are the options? And is one preferable to the others, or is a combination the best option? Let’s look at four different categories and their advantages and disadvantages:

• Digital calendar offline
  For people working with computers a lot it’s easy to use an application like iCal or Outlook. Whenever you get an email with a date for an appointment you copy it in the calendar and you’re done. You can set reminders, manage different calendars at the same time and the planned events are easy to share with classmates, colleagues or friend using the same software. When you carry a laptop it’s also quite easy to use this type of calendar in a classroom setting. The downside: you have to carry this laptop around everywhere you go and take it out of it’s bag when you have to make an appointment when you’re at the dentist or when a friend calls you when you’re on the train or in a similar situation.
• Digital calendar online
  A good way of managing your appointments digitally when you don’t have a laptop and when you’re close to a computer (and the internet) most of the time, is the use of an online version, like Google Calendar. It’s almost as easy to use as the desktop version although it runs in a browser, and it’s great for sharing events or calendars with others. When you’re in a computer centric study environment there will always be an internet connection nearby. The need of an internet connection is also the biggest drawback though. There will always be situations in which you’ll not be able to directly put events on the calendar. And what about portability?
• Paper planner
  This year I started out using a paper planner again, after having trouble with the calendar on my Sony Ericsson M600i. And I really liked it. It’s very flexible, although you can’t move appointments around like you can on a computer, but you can do a lot with a pen. And writing by hand is just fun. I’s small, you can take it anywhere you go and grab it as at any moment. The only problem for me is that you can’t sync it to your computer. And for people who need to share a lot of events in their calendar with others this is also not the best option.
• Digital planner
  This category represents portable digital devices, like a Palm organizer, or an iPhone. In my previous post Will the New iPhone 3G be a Good Planner? I was wondering about it’s capabilities as a digital planner. I’ve been using the iPhone for some weeks now and I’m very happy with it. The problem of having a calendar in your phone is that you might be holding it to your head when you’re making an appointment. I’m using the headphones a lot though, also during calls, which solves this problem. The ability to sync it to your computer is great too. And it can give you reminders, wherever you are. But you have to get used to it, in the beginning it takes some time to enter information, and some people just love pen and paper.

It took me quite some time to figure out the best solution for me. At the moment it’s a combination of iCal and my iPhone. When I’m at my computer I enter events in iCal, which gets automatically synced with the phone, which I use on the go.

Do you have anything to add to this article? I would like to hear what your favorite planning system is and why. Leave a comment and let me know!

Photo by arquera