Using a Time-Block Planner

With the start of Senior year, I decided to get a new type of planner. In the past couple years, I have used the one that I mentioned in this post. But this year, I am using the student planner from Happy Planner.  

The Set Up 

The student planner is organized by time. It is blocked by hour and goes from 7am-9pm. Each hour has space to write assignments or activities. At the end of each day is a bigger space for other notes, stickers, or reminders.  

Each week has a space to write the three main priorities, as well as a habit tracker.  

Example of the pre-month spread

At the start of each month, there is a calendar that spans two pages and has enough room to write events for each day. The following two pages have ways to organize your month and priorities. There’s a to-do list, a priority list, an organize section and a notes section as well as a couple others.  

Calendar

Using the Planner 

As I mentioned in this post, I love color-coding my subjects. I have switched the colors up a bit from last year, mostly based on color availability in other school supplies. This year, AP Art History is blue, Economics (first semester) and Math (second semester) are green, Senior Thesis is purple, college essays are pink, work/swim practice is light blue, newspaper is green, and Bible study is a light pink. I use these colors in the to-do lists and priorities as well as in the hourly pages.  

Daily pages with priorities and tracker

Since I tend to separate my subjects by hour and a half I occasionally draw in my own lines halfway through each hour to show the breaks between different subjects. 

I love how this planner helps me to visualize how my day will be spent and how much time I will have for each subject or activity. It also keeps me from spending too much time on any given subject. If I have a lot of AP Art History homework, I still stop at whatever time I scheduled to stop so that I have time for my other responsibilities. But I always try to schedule a “catch-up” time so that if I have extra work from a subject, I can do it later and not worry about crowding out my other tasks.  

In addition to my schoolwork and extracurriculars, I like to write in other parts of my daily routine like eating and reading my Bible. That way, I don’t miss anything, and I also am able to be more accurate in my time estimations.  

The student planner is definitely one of my favorite planners so far. As a very visual person who loves to plan, seeing each activity in its own time-block is really helpful, and I love seeing how my day will likely play out. Throughout college, I plan to use the same or similar planner because I enjoy the set-up.