For years, I tried desperately to find a planner that worked for me. Throughout middle and high school, it was usually a required item on our school supply list: one academic planner. And without fail, I would use it diligently for a week (sometimes maybe two or three weeks) and then not touch it for the rest of the school year. I even tried online planners and to-do lists with little success there either. But last semester, I made the only New Years resolution that I’ve ever stuck to: keeping a detailed planner and using it to track my life; a second brain, if you will. Now I update my planner daily, if not hourly, and I rely on it heavily for so much that I wonder how I ever went without it. So, what was different this time around? Here’s everything I use my planner for, what I use, and what makes my planner now so different from all of my failed attempts before.
My planner
After figuring out that physical planners didn’t work for me, plus the fact that I was in college and didn’t want to have to lug something extra around in my backpack all the time, I settled on searching for an online planner. I had a few criteria when finding an online planner, though. I liked having physical planners that were cute and customizable, so my online planner had to be like that too. It had to be easy to use or learn how to use, because I was going to set my planner up over winter break and start using it as soon as the semester started. I also didn’t want to put files or lists in there and not be able to find them later, so it had to be intuitive, and I needed to be able to navigate it quickly for convenience of use during classes.
I scoured the internet for the perfect planner. I looked at so many websites listing the best online planners, I searched TikTok and Instagram, I asked my friends and family for recommendations. After much trial and error on this front as well, I finally settled on the perfect planner that was going to be home to basically my entire life: Notion.
What i love about notion
It was so easy for me to get started using Notion mainly because of all of the free templates available. Notion has an entire section of their website dedicated to page templates that Notion or its other users have created, and most of these templates can be downloaded for free.
This made a huge difference when it came to creating my planner. I didn’t have to put in all of the brainpower to come up with and customize every page up myself, all I had to do was find a pretty comprehensive home page template and customize the embedded pages with either other templates or my own vibe.
my home page
My home page of my Notion planner is my one-stop shop for anything and everything I could ever have, want, and need in my planner. It contains five sections: university, adulting, keep track, personal, and lifestyle. It also has cute little widgets to show me the weather, progress bars for the day, week, month, and year, and images and quotes that I’m currently loving. I’ve currently adopted a classical art theme, so the main image on my home page is comprised of famous classical/romantic paintings by artists like Monet. I can also embed Spotify playlists, so I have one of my favorite playlists on my home page as well.
The home page, although pretty straightforward, doesn’t contain much actual info or detail. Let’s go section by section in the other areas, and I’ll finally introduce everything I keep track of with my planner.
university
My university section contains everything I need for school, classes, extracurriculars, and homework. It’s divided into four sections.
fall ’24
This is my general semester tracker. I have a weekly calendar here in the form of a to do list that I update every week, and, most importantly, Fall ’24 houses my assignment tracker.
I created a detailed table in Notion to track every single homework assignment, reading, quiz, test, and important date that I receive. The table includes the name of the assignment/test/date, when it’s due and what time, what class it’s for, what kind of assignment it is, notes about it, and whether it hasn’t been started, it’s in progress, or it’s done (and when I mark it as done, it disappears from the table. How awesome is that?!). This one table has singlehandedly helped me SO much with keeping track of all my assignments and I’ve started relying on it heavily to create my homework schedule.
Also in Fall ’24 is a “card” or a mini page for each of my classes for each semester, where I can insert the class name, abbreviation and number, the instructors, office hours, grading policies, and I can link to the syllabus.
Plus, I have some extra widgets in this section like playlists, progress bars, and images that fit my planner’s overall vibe. This is probably going to be true for every other page, so I’m only going to mention it here. Know that every page does look cute, though.
Grade tracker
My grade tracker is exactly what it sounds like. I utilize tables here again, where I put in my current grades for each of my classes with a section for my final grade to be put in once that class wraps up around finals time. I try to update my grade tracker about every other week, and sometimes I add notes if there’s anything I can do to improve my grade or anything I need to be working extra hard to study.
extracurriculars
Extracurriculars includes everything I use for my campus clubs, activities, involvements, and volunteer opportunities. In fact, I keep all of my drafts for my Her Campus articles within my Extracurriculars page!
I keep track of all my repeated involvement clubs/organizations here, I track volunteer hours, I keep a running list of clubs I’m interested in with links to their pages on Rock Chalk Central, and I keep a table with job/internship applications here as well. I know they sometimes aren’t technically extracurriculars, but it’s nice to have a place to keep track of applications, sometimes including scholarship applications, which do sometimes have to do with extracurriculars.
Grad requirements and goals
I know I’m only a sophomore, but I love to plan ahead. In this section, I have every class that I’ve taken listed with its abbreviation and the number of credit hours I took it for, and I do the same thing for classes I’m currently enrolled in as well as classes I plan to take next semester.
I also tag these classes with the requirements they fulfill, using tags like “major,” “minor,” “honors,” and “core” to indicate exactly what I’m using that class for.
Grad Requirements and Goals also houses my graduation goals (obviously), where I’ve sorted everything I would like to do in my time here at KU (from “join a club related to my major” to “graduate with honors”) and whether it’s in the future, I’m working on it right now, or it’s already been accomplished.
Finally, as an honors student, I track my honors requirements, or ELEs, and keep notes about what I did or am planning to do to fulfill the requirements and which completion category it falls under.
adulting
The next section of my home page has to do with everything I need to function in my day-to-day life, outside of school. It’s broken into four sections as well, each focusing on a different aspect of my normal adult life and responsibilities.
to do
To do houses all of my to do lists, usually without concerning homework. They’re all set up a similar way as my assignments table, though, with the name of the task, whether it’s low, medium, or high priority, how much effort and time I estimate it’s going to take, and whether it’s not started, in progress, or checked off and done. I have separate lists here for daily tasks (reading a chapter of my current book, journaling, doing my skincare routine), school (sending emails, applications, paperwork), personal stuff (working on my current crochet project, small cleaning/organizational tasks), work (sending emails, requesting off, any other smaller projects), and large tasks (significant and time consuming projects or applications, I can also link to other documents in this table).
’24 at a glance
’24 at a glance is a general page for the year. It has my yearlong goals, favorite playlists, what I’m currently listening to, reading, and watching, and monthly reflections. Pretty simple compared to the other pages in that it doesn’t need to be updated nearly as often.
finances
In finances, I keep track of (you guessed it) my finances. I update the amount of money I have in my checking and savings accounts regularly in a table, and I also use this table to input any sort of regular income I have (like from working a job). Underneath the table I have tabs for going more in-depth into income and expenses, and I have tabs for my financial goals, like budgets and how much I want to be saving.
work
The work tab really only served as an hour tracker for the internship I completed this summer. I had to track my own hours for the first few weeks of my internship, so I added a calendar into the page where I added notes on each day that detailed when and how long I worked.
Why this works for me
Notion works well, first and foremost, because I can customize it. There’s something so special about being able to make even an online planner cute, and something you’re happy to open up every day.
The system just works really well for me too. I keep my home page open at all times, and whenever I need anything, like to check a to do list or update an assignment, it’s right there. It almost makes me excited to work on my homework, knowing that before I start, I’ll get to update my homework table and note that I have assignments that are in progress! It really does serve as a form of motivation for me.
As for the three additional sections that I didn’t get around to talking about, I hope to write another article soon about all of the (really fun) stuff I track in my planner so I can go into detail about the things I don’t rely on as much but just use as motivation to stay organized, like my show/movie/book log found in the personal section, and the food and recipes page found in the lifestyle section. The stuff I talked about above is why my planner is fun and easy to use for functioning in daily life, but the rest of the fun pages are what make my planner worth using!
That being said, my bottom line is that you should never give up on being organized! Somewhere out there, there is a planner that works for you. It might be Notion, and in that case I’ve given you an awesome new platform to try and maybe find success in! If it’s not, don’t lose hope. If you find the right method and have some fun with it, you’ll find a planner that works for you… but definitely don’t forget to make it cute!
