My Favourite Agenda Template

I am not a fan of paper agendas. My main reason for this is I find it is easy to forget about things that are due far in the future.

Let’s say it’s September 1st, and you are told in English class that you have a big oral presentation in 20 days. So, you write in your agenda, “Prepare for presentation on September 21st”. Tomorrow, on September 2nd, are you going to rewrite “Prepare for presentation on September 21st” again? Or are you just going to remember that you have this oral coming up?

In a week from now, you will be 1-2 pages further into your agenda. What you wrote on September 1st will not be directly visible anymore, and so it will be and easier to avoid, or completely forget about.

One solution is to write “Prepare for presentation on September 21st” every day for weeks. This will keep the task front and centre, preventing you from forgetting about it. However, this isn’t a great solution — you’d spend a lot of time rewriting what is due, and I don’t recommend doing that.

This is why I’m a fan of online agendas: what is due will stay at the top of your agenda. With digital agendas, you only ever need to input an assignment one time.

I created a custom agenda for my students using a program called Airtable.

Here is my agenda rubric below. It can be sorted in different ways: you can see a list of all your assignments that are due, or sort them by class. This agenda keeps due assignments on your to-do list until they are completed, so you don’t forget about them or have to re-write them every day.

Calendar View

Every time you post an assignment, you’ll be able to see it automatically in your calendar view.

Sorted by Class

In Order of Due Date

You can see even more views by opening the full table here. At the top of the page, there is an option to “Copy base”. Click this to copy my base and use it for yourself! Airtable will ask you to make an account, but their service, and my agenda are both free to use.