Our blog posts share what our students and staff have to say about selected apps. This blog post by Josh reviews Schedule Planner, a scheduling app.
Schedule Planner Review: Track Your Time with Ease
For the past six years, first-year students participating in peer mentoring programs at UNC have ranked time management as their number one challenge. There’s a reason for that: it’s hard to transition from the rigidly scheduled life of a high school student to the unstructured life of a college student without hitting some GPA-rattling bumps along the way. Here, it’s easy for the three hours you set aside for studying to just… slip away.
Schedule Planner, a free app compatible with iOS devices, Android devices, and the Kindle Fire, offers a good way to manage your time more effectively. You can find many of its features in most calendar apps: you can schedule set amounts of time for tasks, categorize tasks, and so on.
Here’s what makes it different: you can set your schedule, see how it goes, and then go back into the app to enter how much time your tasks actually took. From there, Schedule Planner lets you compare what you planned versus what actually happened with nifty charts and statistics, which can help you understand how to schedule your time more accurately. You can even export your stats as a CSV (spreadsheet) file or a PDF.
Here’s the rub: Schedule Planner makes you upgrade to the “Pro” version ($6.99) to use features that are free in other productivity apps and calendars, e.g. color-coded task categories, copying and pasting tasks, syncing to Google Calendar and iCal, creating repeating tasks, and setting alerts. This means that if you use the free version, you can’t have it take a task like “CHEM 101 9:30-11:45” and repeat it every Tuesday and Thursday: you have to input it by hand every time.
In short, downloading the free version and trying it for a few days might best serve you. If Schedule Planner helps you stay on task, it’s worth seven bucks.