[Vid for students] Don’t use the school planner, use this instead

Good morning, it’s me Seth with SethPerler.com and in this video, I’m going to tell you about planners. I know a lot of you hate planners. This video is for high schoolers, middle schoolers, I’m speaking directly to you. If you do not like planners or you hate planners, or you’re not great with planners, or whatever, I’m going to tell you about why you shouldn’t use the school planner and what you should do instead. So first thing middle schoolers and high schoolers is that the school planner, the planner that your school will give you, is about 80 or 90 pages thick. It’s overwhelming and it doesn’t make it something that you want to use because there are so many pages, it feels like a book.

Number two, they had things in there that have nothing to do with planning. For example, the school handbook, who read that in the planner? Maybe one or two people in the school at the beginning of the year. Why are there 15 pages of the school handbook in your planner?

Number three, it has things like the periodic table commonly, misspelled words, and pages for notes. Do you use that? If you use that leave it in there, but most people don’t use it. When you’re using a planner, you want to learn to become better at planning. Get rid of everything in that book that’s not a planner. So these school planners have these extra pages in it first of all. Second of all, they have extra visual clutter. So oftentimes the months are different colors like you might have an orange month, a blue month, and so on and so forth which just is confusing to the eye unless you’re an organized student. Then they often have famous quotes and little tips of the day and little cutesy things all over the planner. All you need is a planner. You don’t need all this stuff in the periphery. If you are a student who struggles with organization, time management, planning, homework, missing assignments, incomplete assignments, not studying for tests, stuff like that. You don’t need anything except for the bare minimum simple planner. So also these planners tend to have the monthly planner and the weekly planner, it’s overkill. It’s too many details. You don’t need to manage that many details. So I’m not a fan of the school planners for your type of brain, for highly organized students who cares, they’re good at it. They can use a daily planner, weekly planner, monthly planner, school planner, whatever they want because their execution, their executive function is strong enough that they can handle whatever. Yours, you have a creative mind, you’re a diversion thinker, you think differently, you processed differently. You don’t need any of that and you don’t want that, what you want is a simple planner.

So there are a few things that I want you to get in your planner. Go to the office store and get a planner that is monthly only. Not monthly and weekly, not monthly and daily for sure. Just a monthly planner. You want it to be an academic planner, not the calendar year that starts in January, you want your planner to start July. You’re going to rip out July because it’s gone, September already. You want a planner with lines on it. I’ll show you that a minute. You want to get one without a spiral if you can find it just because a lot of people with executive function issues crush the spirals in their backpack over the year and then it and makes pages fall out and you just want to avoid that if you, can but if you have to get a spiral, get a spiral. You want to minimize your planner which means rip out all the pages that you don’t need anymore and you want to put your name on your planner front and back really clear just in case you lose it. Don’t just put it on the inside of the planner.

This is one of the planners, this is a monthly planner. It’s not the academic year but at least it’s monthly and it has lines all over. So especially if you have messy handwriting get one with lines, and what you’re going to do is you’re going to go into it and you’re going to rip out everything that doesn’t matter and you want to highlight every day you have off. You want to use the note areas when you can, and you want it to have lines in there so that when you are writing, and you’re going to have to write in shorthand because you’re not going to have as much space in this planner, but when you’re writing your stuff you can fit it in there. So this is the planner that I recommend 90% of my students get. About 10% of my students I say, “Okay use the school planner. You’re using it fine.” If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. So don’t listen to any of my advice ever if what you’re doing is working. Okay, I’m talking about generalities for people that I work with which are people who start with organization, time management, missing, and incompletes, all that stuff I mentioned before. If that’s you then most likely this is best for you. But if you’re using a different planner and it’s working for you, if you’re using an online planner and it’s working for you, if you’re using your Google calendar and it’s working for you, if you use a notecard every day to track things and it’s working for you, I don’t really care what you use if it’s working. But I will say again, 90% of people I work with use this because I teach them how to use it and it works and it’s simple and it’s streamlined and easy to get to use so that you can track your homework, track your test, and track studying. Easily, you can see the entire month because you’re a big picture thinker you’re a global thinker, you’re not a detail-oriented person, so you can see the whole month at a time, and it’s much easier to track what you need to do so that you spend less time during the semester swimming upstream and trying to play catch-up and you spend more time having actual free time that you actually have because you’re on top of your schoolwork. so I hope that helps you, I hope you have a great day. I have a Jumpstart program starting, I hope you join us on Sunday, September 3rd the early bird pricing ends, but the cart will still be open. But you guys can still join us if you want until September 8th, we start on September 9th. Now I hope you have an awesome school year. I’ll see you soon.