Why You Need a (Paper) Planner

No other method or gadget is as truly useful as a paper planner.

One of the first things my advisees learn about me is that I am obsessed with time management—and, therefore, with planners. I believe in old-fashioned planners made of paper, small enough to be carried around in a backpack or purse.

“Why,” many students ask, “do I need a planner, when I already put my appointments on my cell phone?” Other students love their computer calendars, or they just write everything on Post-it notes. And there are lots of other electronic gadgets that promise to help you organize every aspect of your life.

The truth as I see it: no other method or gadget is as truly useful as a paper planner. A planner won’t crash or run out of battery power. You can flip through the pages of your planner and get a sense of what activities and deadlines are coming up. You can clip appointment cards and party invitations to the correct day, which takes even less time than typing the information into your PDA. And remember to hold on to your old yearly planners—they’ll come in handy if you want to write your memoirs someday!

When I taught Developing Academic Success, I often took attendance by asking students to hold up their planners (a required item for the course) as I called their names. I wanted to reinforce the importance of keeping their time-management tool with them every day. Some of my students were annoyed by this at first, but once they started to reap the benefits of good time management, the complaints died down. Sometimes I would run into former students around campus, and they would pull out their planners and say, “See? I can’t do without it now!”

Why does having (and using!) a planner make such a big difference? To see whether a planner would help you, ask yourself a few questions: “Do I ever miss appointments? Do
I end up rushing to finish assignments at the last minute? Do I feel stressed out from trying to remember all the things I have to do? Do I often feel like I’m falling behind?”

If you answer “yes” to any of those questions, why not give yourself some help? Your life is much too complicated to run without a memory aid. As I said before, your planner should fit easily into your backpack or purse. It should have a full page for each day, with sufficient space to mark down both time-specific commitments and general to-do lists. If you aren’t used to it, the initial task of putting all your commitments and deadlines into a planner may seem like a lot of work. But I’ll bet that if you give it a try for one semester, you’ll be hooked, too.