Starting the Semester

One of my biggest weaknesses is that I am kind of an incredibly disorganized person. My saving grace is my planner. I have never been good at keeping up with a planner until my life became a mess without it. I color code entries into my planner, certain colors for different classes and for extracurricular activities.

I have an Erin Condren planner with the vertical weekly layout. The usual horizontal layout causes a whole bunch of confusion and things get jumbled up. This allows me to set things up in chronological order or section things off by subject or school vs. activities, etc. There's an example below:

(Erin Condren planner, web source: Flickr)

Another trick I learned from one of my friends last semester is to take all the syllabi from my classes and make a list of all of the due dates in order. It's kind of like a check sheet to keep all the assignments and due dates in the same place. Color coded by class, of course.