The most important feature of the StudyMinder Homework System student planner is how it allows you to schedule study time to complete your assignments. This tutorial shows you how the scheduling feature works.

(If you are not using the StudyMinder school planner yet, download the free trial and follow along with the tutorial.)

Transcript for Video Tutorial 3

This is the third in a series of tutorials on how to use the StudyMinder Homework System school planner. In the last tutorial we added two assignments. Now over the course of time you’ll add many assignments, tests, and quizzes to the scheduler and you’ll see them here in the homework list, and the list will get quite long. But for today, talking about how to use the study time features, let's just talk about these first two assignments, and it'll be easier to explain exactly how the system works.
Now, notice here on the left side, there is a tab called Study Time Today. Clicking the arrow will open and close it. And you can see that in Study Time Today it says that there are two unfinished assignments, and then here they are in the list view, one and two. Chapter one and chapter two, reading for the English class. And it says the total remaining study time for both assignments is three hours, and that's right. You can see here on the left it says, "Time left one hour thirty minutes" for each assignment. Now back to the Study Time Today tab, it says next that there's a minimum amount of study time you need to do today of zero, and the suggested amount of study time today is forty five minutes.

Now let’s talk about how these values are calculated. To do that let's go to the scheduler. Clicking on the scheduler, this takes us to the calendar view. Now you can move around from one day to the next by clicking on the days in this calendar on the left. You can also select multiple days. Let's do that starting with today, the Fourth, through let's say, Wednesday the Eighth. So now we can see here is today, June Four, tomorrow's June Fifth, and then on June Sixth, on Monday, is the first assignment that’s due. This assignment, if we double click we can open it up, we can see here it says there is one hour and thirty minutes that we need to study for this assignment. And on the left it says the minimum suggested study time that we need to do today is forty five minutes. So, this study time is calculated by taking the amount of time that we have from now until the assignment is due and dividing it up so we do an even amount of studying every day. You can see with today, if we study forty five minutes, and tomorrow, if we study forty five minutes, that totals ninety minutes. And that is how much time we need to study to finish reading chapter one for our English class.

Now if we had another assignment due, let's say, tomorrow, so if we right click in the scheduler, add new assignment, let’s add a class for math, and we’ll say the "Odd problems on page 10", and we’ll leave it at one hour estimated study time, click Save, so now we have another assignment here. So for today now, the suggested study time is higher, it’s an hour and fifteen minutes because we have to finish all of our studying for the assignment due tomorrow plus we need to also work on the study that we need to do for the chapter reading on Monday. Notice also now the minimum study time is now one hour. That's because we have assignments due tomorrow. So if we don't do any studying today, we won't be able to finish. Note that StudyMinder student planner does not consider time on the same day that an assignment is due. You have to finish all of your studying, complete each assignment the night before the assignment is due. So this is how the study time today tab will indicate to you how much homework you need to be doing today.

Now on the other tab under Homework Alerts, there are buttons here that will be highlighted if there is an alert. Let's look at the homework due tomorrow. If you click this button, it will tell you homework is due tomorrow. And you can see that we just added this assignment here, the math class which has assignments due tomorrow, so the Homework Due Tomorrow button is highlighted. Let's double click on the math assignment and let’s mark it Done. Click the Done checkbox, close, and now you can see that in the homework alerts the homework due tomorrow button is no longer highlighted because we have finished our homework that's due tomorrow. Let's go back and unchecked that, so now we have math due tomorrow, and go back to the homework alerts. It says that there's a study time alert. If we click on it, it tells us that we have not scheduled enough study time to finish homework which is due tomorrow.

So the key to organizing your homework with StudyMinder homework planner is to schedule study time. This is June Four, this is today, so let's schedule study time today. Right-clicking, we click the New Study Time menu option, and now we have the study time window open. Here, by description, there's a little clock. We see the clock, that lets you know that you are adding study time. This window looks a lot like the window that you use for adding assignments, but it is a little bit different. You can only select study time from the options. This is specifically for study time. You can add a description if you want to. We could just say, "Study time," or you don't need to because this will be a special color indicating that it’s study time. So tonight, we're going to schedule from five o'clock to six o'clock, one hour of study time. Click Save and it closes. So now, if we have one hour of study time scheduled, that means we should have enough study time scheduled to finish all of our homework tomorrow, which is one hour. Now the homework due button is still highlighted because we haven’t finished our homework yet. Now if we click on the Study Time Alert button, it now says we've not schedule enough study time to finish homework due on June Sixth. Notice that we have scheduled enough study time to finish homework due on June Fifth. Let's schedule more study time for tomorrow. We’ll schedule one more hour again. Click Save and Close. Now we have study time scheduled for tomorrow night too. But notice that the Study Time Alert is still on. That’s because we just scheduled one hour of study time for tomorrow night. But, for Monday, June Sixth, in this reading assignment, if you double click and open it, we have an hour and thirty minutes of study time, so we haven’t scheduled enough time to finish all of our assignments. So let's open back up the study time that we scheduled for tomorrow night. We can add the description, "Study time", so it's easier to see. Let's change the amount of study time to two hours. Save it and close it. So now we have two hours of study time tomorrow. If we open this up we have ninety minutes. Save that. One of our timers just went off. We’ll close that and we’ll just cancel that reminder so it doesn’t go off again. And now the study time alert has changed. Now it says we don't have enough study time scheduled for June Thirteenth. And that's true. If we highlight more of our calendar here, from June Four down to June Thirteen, you can see that we had an assignment down here and we've yet to schedule any study time for this assignment yet. We do have enough for homework due tomorrow and the next day, but not chapter two.

Now one thing that you may want to do to make it simpler, let's go back and just highlight the upcoming week here in the scheduler. One thing that you can do is schedule study time on a recurring basis. Let's take tomorrow’s study time, open it up, and check the recurring event box. This allows us to schedule study time on a recurring basis, so that every night, or sometime during the day every day, or whatever frequency we choose, we can automatically have our study time scheduled. So we can do it daily or weekly. Let’s choose weekly, and let’s say that we're going to be studying Monday through Thursday, or let's say Sunday through Thursday. You may not want to study on Friday night. And we're going to study for two hours every night on these days. And we’ll just set this to continue to occur and until the end of the term, which, let’s say, is the first of August. So now you can see Sunday through Thursday we’ll be studying and we’ll do this through the entire term. Click OK. Now click Save. So now you can see in the scheduler that we have study time scheduled every night on the nights that we selected. Now you can open up one of these and change the recurring event if you want. Just come right back here. We’ll leave it how it is. So now you can see that the study alert button is not lit anymore because we now have scheduled all the study time that we need to have for all of our assignments.

This completes tutorial number three, on how to schedule study time and use the homework alerts in the study time today display.