A step-by-step guide of how to plan and organize your new year!
Hello and welcome to 2025! A new year and a new start to better habits and better versions of ourselves. But for us to reach these ambitious goals of becoming better people, we need a solid plan and schedule. We need to be able to track our classes, appointments, meals, excursions, and all other activities somewhere that we can easily access. That way we can keep ourselves on track to achieve all of our goals. Hence, here is a step-by-step guide on how to plan and organize your new year!
Let’s start with the fundamentals of planning: the time frames. This has to do with the question of how far ahead you intend to plan. Do you need a yearly planner, a monthly planner, a weekly planner, a daily planner, or a combination of a few of them? Perhaps you need a custom time frame like a semester planner, which is only a few months in duration. You need to take into account the tasks you have that you know are recurring and figure out how far into the future you want to be able to see on your planner. That is step one.
Step two is figuring out what space works best for you. When we think of scheduling, I’m sure calendars come to mind. Whether it is Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Microsoft calendar, these softwares can provide the perfect platform for you to organize your tasks and appointments all in one place. You could even use a physical calendar if you don’t want to depend on devices to see your tasks. An advantage to the online calendars, however, is that you can set up alerts and reminders for certain appointments. That can ensure you don’t miss anything important.
You could also use agendas, like the ones we were required to use in primary school. These are great because they often have multiple viewing options included, like monthly and weekly planners. Again, you could get a physical copy or an online one, whichever one you like more.
Another really great planning tool is Notion. You can easily organize your tasks in a to-do list format and then toggle to see them in a monthly calendar. Notion can take some getting used to and maybe some YouTube tutorials, but once you get the hang of it, it is a really useful tool.
The third step is to figure out if you want ALL of your tasks to be scheduled in one place or if you want to divide up your tasks by category and have them in different planners. For example, you could have your work deadlines and appointments on Microsoft Calendar, your school assignments in an agenda, and your meal plan in Apple Calendar. You need to gauge how you prefer to organize and what will be the most useful for you. If having everything in Apple Calendar works for you, then go ahead with that! If you want to divide everything into categories by duration (12 months vs weekly, etc.) or by environment (work vs school vs home, etc.), or by type (assignments, meals, socials), then do that. Remember, this planner is going to be used by you, so create it with your own preferences and habits in mind so that you can actually use it and benefit from it.
Once you figure out how far you’re going to plan, and which space works for you, you can set up your classes, meals, appointments, and tasks however you like. Make sure to schedule or leave some room for downtime. It’s good to be ambitious and organized but your goals and tasks should be organized in an achievable manner, you wouldn’t want to burnout before you reach your goals. A good margin is to have at least 1 day in a month where you plan to do something for yourself. Whether that’s a spa day, a day off from work and school to relax, or just a day where you do nothing, this will help prevent burnout and will have you motivated and energized to achieve all your 2025 goals!
Personally, after researching all of the different platforms where I could plan the beginning of my year, I decided that I wanted a 6-month calendar, an assignment tracker, and a weekly to-do list. So, I printed out monthly calendars from January to June, and marked my major tests and assignments, extra-curricular commitments, and appointments on there. I chose to go with a paper format because I wanted something that I could easily see, so I put it on my wall.
Next, I have used Notion for 3 years now and I love it for tracking assignments. I have all of my major and minor assignments and labs there with the due date, weight of the task, a slot for the grade I receive, and I’ve even included a code that calculates my potential final grade in each class. Of course, it’s not necessary to have your Notion tracker this fancy or complicated, that’s just what was helpful to me. Finally, I use a weekly to-do list to combine my tasks from the 6-month calendar and the Notion tracker every week. So, my assignment deadlines, any appointments from my calendar, and anything important that was not in either of them like an event or something all go on there. I like this system because the act of writing the tasks down again ensures I never miss anything.
I hope this article and my personal scheduling plan were helpful to you in figuring out how to schedule! I am confident that with the right planner, anything is possible. You got this!