The first week of a new semester brings about all kinds of emotions! There’s lots of excitement, nerves, meeting new people, and hopefully not too much stress. As a preface, this post is not sponsored! Truly, I’m impressed with the performance of my new planner! : )

Hello Beautiful.

the Planner Problem…

I am coining the phrase “Planner Shame” right now. This is the case where you spend a fortune on a super cute planner, and you love the heck out of that dang thing. But, after an optimistic couple of months, you forget about it. Unless, in my case, and you don’t have time to keep up with the writing and being a neat freak/perfectionist, and you fall back into the chaos that’s life without a planner. Not really. But still. **Not having the time for a planner is the epitome of ironic.** Personally, I know I have spent too much time and money seeking the perfect planner that is aesthetically pleasing AND functional, then it turns out I can’t even keep up with it! Maybe if I would have found my Mr. Right-Planner in time, I wouldn’t have had such a massive come back post (So Far in College… December)! Maybe I wouldn’t have needed a come-back post…

In another world, I would love to be the girl who has everything together in her perfect little planner with all my colored pens and highlighters… but hey, that’s not me!

Instead, I began my search of… wait for it… ONLINE PLANNERS. FREE. NO PLANNER SHAME. COME AND GO AS YOU PLEASE WITH NO GUILT.

the Search

I began my search for online planners probably around September or October of 2019. I went through myriads (exaggeration) of different websites, and I’ll shamefully admit that I spent way too many hours messing with this (not exaggeration). Procrastination at its’ finest folks. I’m ALLL about my organization. When I have an excuse to find my new “must-have”, it’s an all-day event (exaggeration). I first found this online planner that I really did like, but I didn’t love it. The name seems humorously fitting. Plan. Most of these planners I had seen all had nifty apps that went with them and that was pretty neat! I honestly fell victim to forgetting Plan as the semester continued. It was kind of boring, though it had some pretty cool features. Alas, I found the one I fell in love with! And its name was Taskade!

Getting Used to It

I can honestly say the thing I love most about Taskade is the impressive ability to personalize! It’s truly what drew me to them. I can’t resist a cute theme with my colors AND it matches my blog?! Taskade has unique abilities to create different “projects” and add them to your planner’s calendar!

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Here is a list of my “projects” in my TAMU “Workspace”! I made a project for each class, and this is ultimately where I keep track of my homework assignments and syllabus notes! I created “templates” of how I wanted each class to look so it was super easy to work with!

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Here, I have three “Workspaces”; Lauren (for everyday things!), Texas A&M (for all my school things), and Lauren Kay’s Journal (for your’s truly). I have separated these intentionally to bring all the things I’m working on together into one spot, but not mixed together! I’ve created an “Agenda” template under “Lauren”, as well as what I called “What’s Cookin’ ” for meal planning!

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The colorful “tags” associated with all my projects are useful in the sense that they allow you to organize your work! If I wanted to only look at my weekly agendas, I could select the tag at the top and only my agendas would be visible.

and the Rest is History!

Overall, I am still learning to navigate this beautiful beast. From what I have read about this app, it can do much more than I could gather from a week’s worth of use! There are social options and sharing (“Invitations”). You can work together on a project at the same time kind of like google docs! The app works marvelously and it comes in so handy when I go grocery shopping!

I hope you give it a try if you have an inkling to come to the dark side of organization. I’m lovin’ it up over here!