Digital planner

What It Means

A digital planner is any planner you keep on a screen instead of on paper. It can be a calendar app, a task listTo-do listA written list of the tasks you plan to do, checked or crossed off as each one is finished. See more app, a mix of the two, or a planner file with dated pages that you write on with a stylus on a tablet. UNC Chapel Hill's Learning Center treats an online calendar as just as good a tool for big-picture and weekly planning as a hard-copy plannerPaper plannerA printed or handwritten planner, such as a bound book, a notebook or printed pages, used to plan days, weeks and months on paper. See more, so the deciding question is which one you'll keep up with.

How It Sounds at Home

• "Put it in the shared calendar or it didn't happen."
• "I moved my whole planner onto my tablet."
• "My phone reminded me, thank goodness."

The Breakdown

How to set one up (Buhata's own suggestion)

1. Pick one home for dates and one for tasks, and stick with them. Two calendars that disagree are worse than one.
2. Add the big picture first: birthdays, school breaks, bill dates and trips, set to repeat where they do. UNC's Learning Center suggests keeping that big picture in view all term.
3. Add every fixed weekly event, such as work hours, classes, practices and pickups, as repeating events.
4. Choose how you'll see each week. UNC's printable planners use 60-minute, 30-minute or morning-afternoon-evening blocks, and the same idea works in a calendar's week view.
5. Set reminders only for things you might really forget, so the alerts stay worth reading.
6. Give it a few minutes each day and a longer look once a week.

Short version to try today. Add next week's fixed events to the calendar on your phone and set one reminder for the thing you're most likely to forget.

Digital or paper

This comparison is Buhata's own. UNC's Learning Center treats both as good tools.

Good to Know

A digital planner only helps if it holds everything, so moving shared family dates into it is the step that matters most. Buhata's daily planning page describes a short routine for choosing each day's priorities, and its time-blocking page shows how to give each block of the day a job, both of which carry over to an app. If your planner is a downloaded file, keep a backup copy so a lost tablet doesn't take your year with it.

Related Terms and Categories

• Paper planner

  A printed or handwritten planner, such as a bound book, a notebook or printed pages, used to plan days, weeks and months on paper.

• Weekly review

  A regular session, usually weekly, where you clear your inboxes, bring your lists and calendar up to date and decide what matters next.

• Bullet journal

  Ryder Carroll's notebook method for tracking tasks, events and notes with short entries and symbols, organized into an index and daily, monthly and future logs.

Family organization and routines