How I’m Prepping for My First Semester of Online School

I am officially a college student and before starting, I want to make sure I have everything prepped in terms of stationery and workplace. The university experience is going to be a little bit different than what was expected due to everything going on around the world. The good thing is that we have online and electronic tools to help us start and maintain the intake of education. I thought I would share with you guys how I’m prepping for my first semester of online school and just my first semester in university overall for anyone out there starting online college like me who might find this helpful.

Gather Stationery

Stationery is something that I feel passionate about as you may have realized with the kind of posts I make. Thankfully I didn’t have to buy any stationery as I like to make my own most of the time and have already accumulated quite a bit from my years in school in which I got extra notebooks and supplies.

Binders/ Discbound

I’ve been loving using the happy planner system throughout college because it gives lots of freedom for notetaking and managing your papers. If you want to see what I sue the happy planner system for, feel free to check out my July 2020 planner and journal lineup.

Though I am very much in love with the discbound system as a whole, I went onto preparing a binder to use for the subjects I will be given at uni. I don’t think I will have to turn in any notebook online nature of this semester so I think a binder would do the job and another good thing is that I already had the supplies from previous school years like loose-leaf paper and just had to make the dividers with some cardstock I had at home.

Note Taking Tools

Aside from my bullet journal essentials, I will be using sticky notes for note-taking. As of recently, I’ve been using a notepad for daily to-do lists and adding them to my discbound planner to keep them around.

College Planner

The reason why this isn’t in the stationery section of this post is that I consider this a project of its own. Currently, I’m working on a College Planner for the free printables library offered to email subscribers.

I will most likely use my bullet journal as my college planner but I wanted to make sure that you could have the functionality of the spreads I will be making and have something to keep yourself organized in terms of college.

I’m in the midst of finishing the designs to then move onto making different sizes in case some of you have a specific planner size you would like to work on.

Notion Setup

In a few blog posts, I’ve mentioned how I use Notion as my digital planner to work on any creative projects regarding this brand and any special project that comes up.

I will use a simple setup for College as I don’t know just yet if I will be making much use of it. I know that I already have my binder but I think I will find Notion really helpful at times when I need to take lots of notes real fast.

I think I will use the template created by Thomas Frank. He made a video explaining how to use the Notebook template he made for Notion in case you are interested in checking it out.

Workplace

My desk will become my classroom for the next 5 months and I need to make sure that it is organized and has the perfect setup to work on. I’ve been rearranging my bedroom these past few weeks so that it is a clean and organized space to study in.

I’ve watched tons of videos on productivity and something they always mention is having a dedicated space to be productive in. I made things like the DIY desk organizer to make sure that I have every supply and piece of paper stored and be able to have a clean desk.

I hope you found this blog post helpful and if you are starting school, that you have a great semester. If you have any requests for the college planner I’m designing make sure to leave them in the comments so that I can include it in the printable. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get updated on the weekly content and have access to the free printables library.

Be Yourself, Be Happy, Be Human.
Lots of Love, Patrick.