As a student who works full-time, I’m fully aware that it is insanely hard to plan your days around your class schedule. One of the things I’ve discovered is that if you don’t plan for your work and your classes it’s really easy to either skip your personal life or forget to complete important assignments. Over the years, I’ve tried a few different methods, which I’ll explain below:

1. CalendarsThatWork.com – First, my two favorite calendars are offered free. Having said that, I’ll admit to subscribing to the service because it’s totally worth it. For students the Weekly Portrait is your new BFF – use the left column to write down class times, and the large right side to note new homework or when assignments are due. Don’t want to have a full page calendar? Just want to plan out blocks of time for classes and events? Use the 7-Day Booklet.
2. Backpack – I use a proprietary software at work that is similar to this tool from the folks at 37 Signals. Backpack offers a free 30-day trail, making it ideal for students, although you have to give up the credit card info to sign up. At $7 per month it’s less than the average lunch on a college campus, and you have a whole month to figure out if it helps you enough to be a good investment. Plus, it has the added advantage of being online so you can access it from any computer.
3. Abandon your traditional To-Do list for the “paper clock” method. Unfortunately, I cannot find the site I originally found this great idea on. The concept is pretty simple, though, so I think we can get through this. You just draw a clock, as shown below, on a piece of paper or the back of your hand. Projecting out around the clock you write in stuff you’d like to work on around that time of the day. I made an example for today, which happens to be Superbowl Sunday.