Five Tips for Organizing Your Daily Planner for Work

One of the handiest tools for any administrative professional is their daily planner. Whether you use a digital daily planner, or prefer to handwrite everything, having a daily planner is a necessity. There is no better way to keep track of all the administrative responsibilities you are tasked with throughout the day.

Organizing your daily planner can be a simple way to boost productivity even more as an administrative professional. Even if you already feel like you’re well-organized, learning new organizational skills can always help. Here are some tips to improve your daily planner organization.

Daily Planner Template: How to Stay Organized

Color Coding

One of the simplest daily planner organizational tips is to use color coding for various types of events and tasks. Color coding is often the easiest way to visually break up all the different items in your daily planner. In addition, color coding is straightforward and easy to implement. And, you can use whatever color coding system works best for you.

Notes Section

Another tip is to leave a section for notes in your daily planner template. Many daily planner apps will have this feature built-in. But if you don’t already take advantage of this feature, you should. Including a notes section in your daily planner helps to ensure that any important information is easy to find. It also helps to ensure that you do not overlook any small, but critical, details when setting a schedule.

Contacts Section

Keeping track of contacts these days is easier in some ways, but more difficult in others. It’s easy to store and save contacts on various devices, but keeping your contacts organized is its own challenge. A common and effective strategy is including and utilizing a contacts section in your daily planner for certain key contacts. This helps to ensure that any important contact information is readily available when organizing a schedule.

Task Prioritization

As for organizing the tasks in your daily planner, one of the most effective organization strategies is task prioritization. This strategy involves identifying which tasks are most urgent or important as the first step in your process. Everything else in your daily planner should follow from there, with the most important tasks being prioritized ahead of others.

There are a few ways to mark your task prioritization system. Color coding is one way. Another method is using stars or other symbols to denote the most crucial tasks. In addition, ranked lists can also be helpful. 

Give Yourself a Buffer

One of the easiest mistakes to make when it comes to building a schedule is trying to do too much. Or, in other words, trying to be too organized. There are a few strategies you can use to avoid this trap. 

One is to use timeboxing, or diving your schedule into chunks of time, rather than trying to be exact. This allows you to set aside time for everything that needs to get done, while still leaving yourself some flexibility.

Best Daily Planner for Administrative Professionals

There are dozens of great daily planner apps available for free. Digital daily planners have become highly advanced, allowing users to customize and organize their schedules according to their own preferences. When it comes to finding the best daily planner app, that will depend on what you are looking for.

Some of the most popular daily planner app suggestions include Todoist, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook. Each of these three daily planner apps are free to use, though premium subscriptions are available for small fees. To learn more about the best daily planner apps, check out ASAP’s guide for Game-Changing Tech Tools for Administrative Assistants.