The cliche is that 9 – 5 professionals are calendar people. Students should, and can also be calendar people.

Here are some tips from a student on using a digital calendar.

Free calendars are good enough

I’m talking about Google Calendar. Or the Apple Calendar for the Apple users.

Create a calendar for each aspect of your life

Google Calendar allows you to create multiple calendars. Don’t simply club all your events into two or three calendars like – Work, Personal, and Side Hustle.

Instead, break down your entire life into the multiple aspects that it includes. So for a student, some suggestions could be :

• Morning lecture
• Noon lecture
• Commute time
• Study/ Academics
• Meetings
• Extracurriculars
• Projects
• Home and Personal
• Admin tasks

Create a color palette

Choose certain colors to represent one aspect of your life and calendar. You can also choose a color palette to make the whole calendar look aesthetic. Head over to ColorHunt for some inspo.

Use widgets

Keep the Google Calendar widget on your home screen. Put it in your bookmarked tabs. Keep your calendar easily accessible for yourself.

Update your calendar often

Without making updates to events and class timings on your calendar, your calendar is pretty useless. So any time a class timing changes, an extra lecture is added or a group meeting comes up – put it in your calendar.

Allow calendar notifications

Keep the desktop and phone notifications of your calendar open. You can also try the app – Calendar Alarm from the PlayStore to allow for an alarm to ring when an event is about to begin

Due dates and Deadlines

The easiest way to know that a deadline is coming up or that an assignment is due is to write the assignment down as an all-day event – and make it red in color

By making it red in color and an all-day event – it is the first thing you see on your agenda for the day when you open your calendar

Create recurring events for pre-planned events

For anything in your life that is a part of your routine – your lecture timings, your workout class, simply create a recurring event for that time slot and select the days it falls on.

Apply your to-do list to your calendar

By scheduling your to-do list into your day using your calendar, it can stop you from being over-ambitious about the amount of work you will be able to finish. By planning your tasks around your scheduled events on the calendar – you can set more realistic expectations about how many tasks you can complete.