How to Use the iPhone as a Planner

In June I asked the question: Will the New iPhone 3G be a Good Planner?. I didn’t have an iPhone myself back then, as it wasn’t available where I live. Since august I’ve been using one though, so this is a good moment to get back to that question and see how the iPhone holds up to the expectations I had back then. A lot of people visited this website because they searched for “iPhone planner” in Google, so I guess there’s quite some interest in such thing.

To my knowledge there is no application that can do everything you need to create a waterproof planning system. But can you make your iPhone a good planner by combining a few applications? This was one of the main reasons why I bought an iPhone in the first place. I was using a Moleskine weekly planner at the time to hold my appointments and to-do lists. I used iCal mainly for setting reminders. I played around with different GTD applications, but they Read more

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. Read more