Saturn Summer Updates

We’re focused on high schoolers because we recognize time management is particularly challenging during this time of life. It’s a problem we experienced firsthand - our founder started Saturn as a high schooler himself to manage his nearly impossible schedule (like seriously, what is this?)

Simply put, school schedules are insanely stressful. Periods meet at random times like 8:03-9:07 am and often rotate between a few schedules so you have to keep track of if it’s an “A Day,” “B Day” or “C Day” like this. Add in sports, homework, and a job and it’s no surprise that time management is a major contributor the teen mental health crisis. Time management is a source of stress for 55% of teens, according to an ASCD report.

More than a million teens now rely on Saturn to manage their school day. We can handle all the weird times and rotations mentioned above, and integrate tasks so you can auto-populate due dates based on your schedule. Classes also have chats so you can manage work and communication in one spot (you have to verify you’re a student to access any communication features!). To make scheduling less of a chore for students, we’ve also built a lot of youthful delights like widgets, countdowns, and confetti to celebrate when you finish a task.

One of my favorite app store reviews

We’ve spent the past few years making Saturn the absolute best app for managing your academic day and feel like we’ve accomplished that. Now, our team is hard at work building features to support the rest of students’ days — their sports, clubs, jobs, time with friends, and personal time. The average high schooler spends 7.9 hours per week in extracurriculars, with some spending up to 20 hours on these activities and commitments, so we’re excited to make these schedules easy to manage.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this summer and what you can expect to see in the app this fall:

1. Group Calendars: Now, you can create group calendars on Saturn. Sports captains can create a calendar with practice schedules and games and share it with their team. The drama club can add rehearsals and performance schedules and share it with their members. Groups have two types of events: private events for approved members only and public events to the whole school to promote attendance (again, this requires verification!).

2. Improved Calendar Layout: Previously, Saturn’s home tab only showed you two events: what’s happening now and what’s happening next. This year, we’ve combined the Calendar and Now tabs to give you more visibility into your whole day/week. We also introduced “Day View” so you can pick between viewing your day as a running list (our traditional view) or visualizing the free time in between events.

   

   
   

3. Recurring Events: Many student events meet with a regular cadence — sports practices and rehearsals typically meet daily, job shifts might be twice a week, and club meetings meet weekly. Previously, you’d have to add each instance one by one which was… painful, we know. We honestly can’t believe how many of you did it. Now, with a single tap, you can create these events for the entire semester!

   

   
   

4. Mobile Invites: We’re pretty excited about this one cause who has each other’s email these days? Now you can easily share an event with someone via iMessage, Snap, or Instagram which are much less formal, too. This supports our vision of being the first truly mobile-based calendar.

5. Google Calendar Integration: Selfishly, we’d love to be the only calendar app students use, but for now, we recognize there’s value in integrating with an email-based calendar. Invitations from teachers, jobs, or other third parties are still sent via email. Last year, we heard from students that they were using two calendars to manage their time, which sounded pretty annoying. Now, you can link your Google Calendar to manage everything in one place. More integrations are coming soon!

   

Have an idea for a new feature in Saturn? Contact us and we’ll be sure to get back to you.

Denali Tietjen has been a product leader at Saturn for 5 years, building the product from a couple dozen schools to over 18,000.