It’s late on a Monday night. You’ve just finished playing three straight hours of your favorite video game. Your roommate has gone to bed, and you’re also set to hit the sack. Then it hits you. You have a five-page biology essay due at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, and you haven’t started yet. You’ve known about it for three weeks, but other assignments and events ate up your time. If you had been using one of the best academic planners to help schedule your time, you might have avoided this last-second crisis.
Using an academic planner can help any student avoid a situation like the one mentioned above. An academic planner helps students build assignments, exams, and commitments into a timetable to ensure everything is completed on time or in advance. If you want to find an academic planner that covers all the bases, monday.com offers templates that students can adapt to their own needs and schedules and access anytime from anywhere.
What’s an academic planner?
Unlike regular planners, which let you schedule meetings, project deadlines, and essential business tasks, an academic planner is specifically made and designed for students or teachers. Academic planners also cover different periods of time compared to regular planners. Regular planners usually cover January to December of a particular year. Academic planners typically cover college semesters, which usually begin in July or August and last until April or May. An academic planner is a school agenda book designed to help you manage your time, track assignments and exams, take notes, follow class schedules, and most importantly, stay organized.
Academic planners are for far more than just remembering to do your homework.What makes an effective academic planner?
It’s one thing to know you have a biology essay due this week and that you have an English exam next week. It’s more important that you know when you’re going to work on that essay and study for that English exam. That’s the real purpose of an academic planner.
An effective academic planner lets you track classes and activities. You can schedule study time and plot work sessions for projects or assignments. The best academic planners let you attach your source documents and research to a project and collaborate with your project partners. Academic planners don’t have to be about class time — some of the best academic planners and tools for education help you run a student club or activity, including membership to student clubs, for example.
Benefits of using an academic planner
Students who use academic planners take a step toward a more organized and fruitful college career. Check out some of the benefits to the monday.com Student Organizer Template below.
Time management
Perhaps the most crucial thing an academic planner provides is a way to manage your time responsibly. It eliminates guesswork (“Do I have a test next Thursday?”), and gives you a clear idea about which assignments to prioritize over others.
Track assignments
You should always have access to your planner. Since your monday.com academic planner lets you use any internet-connected device, you can record your assignments immediately in the classroom. With so many assignments and activities to juggle, you may be unable to remember everything. Recording your assignments, quizzes, and exams when you learn about them helps you avoid that last-second “I forgot I had an assignment due in the morning” crisis.
Commitments outside of college
Maybe you have a job, volunteer at a local food pantry, or are a part of a fraternity or sorority that requires you to attend weekly meetings. You need to schedule those hours around doing essays, attending class, and taking tests. Use monday.com’s Student Organizer Template and track all these critical events in one place instead of several calendars.
To-dos
You might be one of those people who have a hard time remembering that you need to do your laundry or get so wrapped up in your studies that you forget to buy food at the grocery store. You wouldn’t be the first student to have this problem. Use your academic planner to schedule time for these life-essential tasks to ensure they get completed.
Improves productivity
Academic planners are useful when attending college, participating in extracurricular activities, and working a part-time job. Budgeting your time wisely makes you less likely to feel overwhelmed by school and work. The more you use your academic planner to schedule the different elements of your college life, the more likely you are to complete tasks on time and not constantly feel rushed to get things done.
The best academic planners help students build assignments, exams, and commitments into a timetable that lets them complete everything on time or in advance.
Improved sleep
Scheduling and daily organizing activities can have a direct effect on your sleep. When you use an academic planner, you provide a sense of security and calmness that can help you relax and sleep better. You can increase your psychological, intellectual, and physical performance if you’re not worried about what you’re supposed to be doing or some assignment you may have forgotten. Some experts also believe that using an academic planner can help stimulate your immune system by reducing stress.
Some tips on using monday.com’s academic planner tools
You’ll find many ways to use your monday.com Student Organizer Template. Here are some tips to help:
- Fill in your permanent tasks and due dates as soon as you know them: When your professor tells you the days of your final exams or midterms, schedule them in your academic planner as soon as possible. One key advantage of the monday.com Student Organizer Template is you have it with you wherever you go, making it easy to add these important dates.
- Set weekly goals: If you know that you need to schedule 15 hours in the lab over the next 3 weeks, it makes much more sense to schedule 5 hours a week over the course of 3 weeks rather than 15 hours in one day. Setting weekly goals helps you accomplish complex tasks by sorting them into more manageable chunks. By doing this, you’re more likely to complete the job and reduce your stress.
- Cross out assignments as you complete them: When you cross off your assignments, quizzes, and tests as you complete them, it helps build your sense of accomplishment. It also encourages you to continue using your academic planner to help you stay on top of things.
- Organize breaks into your schedule: While it’s important to schedule tasks, it’s also important to remember when you need breaks. One helpful way of doing this is to use a Pomodoro timer. It’s a time management system that works best when you have large chunks of time to work. The Pomodoro method breaks up a large span of time into 25-minute chunks, with 5-minute breaks in between. Each of these 5-minute chunks is called a Pomodoro, and every fourth or fifth Pomodoro, you take a longer 15-20 minute break. When paired with your Student Organizer Template, you can count on completing large projects efficiently.
monday.com’s academic planner tools can help you succeed
Academic planners are essential to helping students learn time management, be better organized, and complete more of their assignments and tasks on time and with less stress. At monday.com, we offer several tools to help you during your college years.
monday.com has a variety of education tools designed to support every aspect of your college life:
- Academic Requirements Tracker: Track your progress toward your degree requirements during your college career.
- Research Power Tools: Organize important projects and easily collaborate with your fellow students while working on projects.
- Networking and Job Applications: This tool helps with a part-time job search or when you’re looking for full-time employment after you graduate.
- Student Organization Essentials: If you’re involved with a campus student organization, this tool can help you keep your events and activities organized while maintaining an active member database.
- Publications and Journals: One of the rules of academic life is “publish or perish.” This monday.com tool helps you track all your various publications, from when you submitted a piece to who’s doing the editing to where you are in the approval process.
These are just some of the tools available at monday.com. All of our student templates and academic planners are designed to help you have a more enjoyable college experience, and feel more relaxed and accomplished.
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