You should know that I LOVE Paperchase with its bright colours, funky patterns and cute animals. Once again paperchase have produced a fantastic new range of mid-year diaries.
The main theme is nature – with plenty of cute animals and plants featuring in this years collection.
Their mid-year diaries include student essentials such as timetable pages as well as the standard diary.
Favourites include:
Kicking off the countdown with one of my all time favourite diaries – Letts which have a fantastic collection of academic diaries. I love their traditional ‘Letts’ plain bound diaries as they remind me of being a child (I had a letts desk diary each year to play with).
However for being a student and carting the diary on the go the A6 or A5 is a more appropriate size.
More recently Letts have ‘funked up’ their academic diaries by making them bright and colourful. However, I am a traditional girl at heart.
On a personal level I favour the A5 week view (week on two pages). This allows me enough space to write in two columns for each day of the week. On the left hand side I write the things I am doing that day i.e. time, event and place and then on the right hand side I keep my to-do list. This means that I only have up to 8 items per day which is a manageable amount.
I have decided to revive an old blog series which I started in 2010 where I have a closer look at some of the diary options for the upcoming year. However, this time I am taking a closer look at some academic / student planners or diaries which run from 2013 to 2014.
But first… what makes a good student planner? In my previous post I explained what I learned from my original homework diary and what stayed with me beyond my school and university years. In my opinion a good student planner needs:
The rest of the week I will be putting a few of my favourite academic diaries under the spotlight in this year’s countdown to the new academic year.
Back to School season is approaching fast and I was thinking the other day about the good old-fashioned homework diary (Student Planner) that my school provided me with.
I no longer have a copy lying around otherwise I would have added in some pictures. It had the school logo on the front, a Timetable section and a WO2P diary (with the holidays filled in) for listing your homework. I used the method of writing items on the date due and not date received. I still use that method to this day.
Each week also had a daily checklist to try to develop the habit of reading a newspaper daily and reading a book a week. As my school was trying to encourage every student to do this. It was the first time I experienced this, and in my teenage years wasn’t really interested in it. However, it was reviewed and signed off by our class teacher. I was continuously told I needed to read a better newspaper and not just the local paper. But looking back it was probably better than nothing.
Since then it is a technique I have used on and off when trying to develop habits which has had varied success over the years.
At university I used a regular Moleskine diary as a student planner – maintaining the same techniques {which you may have read about on the blog at the time if you are a long-time reader). Since my studies I have migrated to using a filofax for my work/personal life and a filofax for my blog.
However the same set up has remained: due date entries and habit development checklists with a weekly timetable at the front.
How has your diary changed since your student days? What did you learn from using your student planner?
Notes in a Book 