One of the most important skills we can teach our teens is the ability to plan. And developing the skill and habit of using planners is a big part of it. However, lots of students look as using a planner, not as a way to simplify and make life easier, but as an additional time-wasting chore. One way to help develop any habit is to reduce the friction in taking action. Even the smallest obstacle can become a reason to just rely on memory rather than writing things down and thinking it through to the end. So how can we make our student’s planners easier to use? Here are 5 ways. Attachable pen: First reason not to use your planner? You can’t find your pen. There is an easy fix for that...a self attachable pen loop! These things are cheap, so you can buy several attach them to anything that needs a pen (planner, notebooks, binders, etc). I have one attached to my planner. It has an adhesive patch that sticks to the inside cover and a loop that hold a pen or pencil. Just make sure to put the pen back when you are done! Here is what mine looks like:   Bookmark: Second reason not to use your planner...it’s annoying to find today. There are lots of ways to keep today marked. The best way is with a bookmark. The planner that Muirlands Middle uses has a ruler/bookmark built in. Just insert it into the spiral with “Today” peeking out, and you’ve made it easy to find the current calendar week. Get multiple bookmarks if there is more than one page you’d like to mark. Remove pages you don’t need/want: Third reason not to use a planner...all the pages in the planner you don’t care about make it bulkier and needlessly complicated to find what you need. Well who says you have to keep them! Tear out everything that is irrelevant to you. Not in chemistry? Then you probably don’t need the periodic table page, right? Don’t feel you need school policies in your planner? That’s probably ten pages you can remove. Go ahead and tear out previous weeks’ plans if you don’t feel they are relevant to you now. Make your planner as lean as you like so that every page in it is useful to you.   Spiral puncher: Well, if you are tearing out the things you don’t want, why not add things that you do want? A spiral puncher can help! These are great ways to insert pages for projects that you need more space for than what is provided in your current planner. Also great for adding extra sheets for notes to be processed later. We have a spiral puncher here at the office as well.   Plan to plan: In the rush of trying to get everything done during the day, it’s easy to let planning slip off the radar. So the more important thing to plan is...time to plan! Make the first 15 minutes your student get home planning time. At that time, everything that happened that has not yet been transferred to a planner should be, and time that needs to be spend on assignments and studying should be scheduled. Make spending at least 15 minutes per day on planning, decompressing, and downloading your brain will make it 100x easier to focus on each individual task you need to complete, without forgetting anything. What tricks do you or your son/daughter have for making their planners more effective? -Vince Does your son/daughter need support in planning and using their planners? We can help! Give us a call at 858.551.2650 or email help@wellsacademics.com.