What is a planner? How to use it to be organised?

If you have been seeing a lot of planners, and a lot of ads for planners, you must be wondering what the hype is all about.

Whether you are a student, a working official, a businessman, or an entrepreneur, it's always good to set deadlines, given that you have an action plan.

A planner is a layout of how your day/week/month is going to be like. Or simply put, it's assigning different tasks to different days and different time.

How to use a planner to be more organised:

How to begin:

1. In a rough notebook, make a list of everything you want to get done in a month.

2. Prioritise according to what you want to get done first. You can begin with the small easy tasks, the completion of which will give you confidence. Or you can begin with the most complex of all so that it puts you at ease.

3. Next, assign a date in front of all these tasks. And in your calendar, write the tasks against the dates.

Making a main/introductory page:

4. Once all the deadlines are in place, you can make a beautiful introduction page to begin the month with. Some ideas for the introduction page:

• Major agendas

• Summary of the month (which can be filled later)

• A motivating quote

• A mood board or pictures depicting how you want your month to be

Making sure you meet the deadlines:

5. Once your goal and time planner is sorted, what remains is making sure that you meet the deadlines, and ultimately achieve what you have planned.

To do that, it is necessary that you break all the major tasks into small achievable goals. This is where a daily planner comes into play; i.e. setting out the tasks for every day.

A good thing to do here would be to see the calendar, and assign the daily tasks according to that first; after which you can also add your routine tasks.

Why Plan and why make it look good?

If you make your planner look good, you'll get into the groove of getting things done, and if you are putting so much effort in planning, who knows you might end up following it too! Plus, no one is allergic to pretty things?

Of course, Google Calendar is always there to make scheduling easy, but having something on paper is tangible. It's another level of relief crossing something out on a paper after completing it. It makes it believable that something is done.

And while we live, it's not a bad idea to get things done (most of the times, at least).