Nostalgic for Organization: Millennials, Planners, and the Fantasy of Control
Nostalgic for Organization: Millennials, Planners, and the Fantasy of Control
The Planner Addiction: Escaping Productivity Culture in Virgo Season
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It’s Virgo season and back-to-school time. While I could get romantic and quote You’ve Got Mail, offering to send you a bouquet of sharpened pencils, I wanted to write instead on a millennial feeling I get each year at this time. Am I the only person who somehow wakes up each September thinking: If only I had the perfect planner, I’d 100% have my life together?
Where did this feeling come from? For me, it started in grade school with the free daily planner I received at the start of each year. There, I’d assiduously mark down my homework in cursive and take a real thrill in crossing through every completed task. Was this training me to take pride in myself only for my capacity to be productive and/or excel in a way I am still dealing with? Possibly.
I saw a story a few months ago about the specific planner I had in high school with its hologram cover and motivational sayings peppered throughout:
Like many on the internet who were in school in the 90s and 00s, this image unlocked a whole host of memories for me. I got this exact planner every year in high school and used it religiously. Freshmen year, I remember being afraid I’d forget what pages of Les Mis I had to each week for a pop quiz. The stakes were high! You had to have a certain average to go see the musical on Broadyway in the spring. Talk about motivation. I also loved my planner as a placeto record nonsense and doodle during class. It was one of few safe things seen to be writing in during class without raising suspicion. I threw mine out at the end of each year, seemingly embracing the ephemeral nature of this book. History be damned! No one needed to see the portraits I drew of teachers or the lists of movies I hoped to rent that weekend at Blockbuster.
Talking about this planner with my wife, I learned she kept all of her planners from high school. This is not a surprise as she’s a librarian and has an impulse to archive. Reading her very neat handwriting from the same year I was in high school, and flipping to the day we’d eventually get married (June 6, D-Day #neverforget), I was filled with a rush of nostalgia for a time in my wife’s life when I didn’t know her. I think there must be a German word for this feeling; of missing a part of a person’s life when you didn’t get the chance to know them. My wife and I grew up 20 minutes apart from each other (and a year apart in school), and did not know each other. Now, seeing these pages, I wish I’d had the chance to know her and be her friend. Would we have liked the same books? Would she have gone with me to see strange indy films at a theater near us that no longer exists?
Even if I couldn’t get answers on that, could I at least figure out why she needed to talk to her dad about Encarta in 2005 (?)
Historically, planners were used to record daily activity after the fact. George Washington used one interleaved with an almanac to record who he’d seen that day, where he’d traveled, etc. Martha Ballard used a diary (the word the British still use for planners) to record the births she’d attended as a midwife and the women she’d treated (along with the weather and other small details of daily life). John Quincy Adams kept two because he was humble and thought we’d want an expanded and abridged version of his daily thoughts (like how he thought the sound of women singing was annoying, etc. ).
It wasn’t until the 18th century when print expanded and industry developed that planners encouraged us to sketch the future and make the most of our time. Somewhere the dream of Malcolm Gladwell and his “10,000” hours theory was not yet realized (thank god), but planners could suggest that each day was now an opportunity to be our most productive selves One example is the Wanamaker Diary, a planner offered for free by a department store, which resembles modern planners today.
The right-hand page has blank lines for each day, along with some kind of motivational saying like the planners I had in high school. The left-hand page had an ad for something you could buy at the Department store. (Check out a 1909 Wanamaker Diary here and more history of the daily planner in this book by Molly McCarthy).
A few months ago in Book Riot, Kelly Jensen wrote a great history of the planners I grew up using. Founded by Sharon Powers in 1985, a company called School Date Books designed school planners that offered students a means of staying organized and productive. This innovation could not have come at a better time, Jensen notes, because the Reagan administration had recently pivoted from trying to dismantle the Department of Education to instead studying the perceived failures of American schools. In 1983, a commission of “experts” that included only one teacher issued a report called A Nation at Risk that suggested schools went off the rails by focusing too much on what the report called “personal, social, and political problems.”
As Jensen writes in her history:
A Nation at Risk ultimately flipped Reagan’s initial goals of getting rid of the Department of Education. It instead spurred a movement pushing for a more rigorous set of standards students needed to meet. The report used war-coded language during the heights of the Cold War, and it pointed to how, under liberal leadership, public education had withered into little more than social-emotional learning (in the ’80s, they called it “self-esteem learning”). (Book Riot)
Before I get too caught up in the parallels to today’s pearl-clutching at the perceived sacrifice of education in schools on the alter of learning how to be a person and care about other people, I will simply say planners seemed like the natural solution for kids who suddenly found themselves with more homework than ever in the hopes of *checks notes* winning the cold war (?)
What interests me about daily planners as a type of thing are not the histories of how the form has changed or even the shift from paper to digital. I’m more invested in the stories we tell ourselves about the role of daily planners in our lives and what our use of them says about us.
Are we okay? Are we doing “enough?”
During the initial Covid pandemic outbreak, I stopped using planners. I stopped listening to the news when I woke up. A lot of my daily regimen came to a halt or abruptly stopped. Around that time, a college student I worked with told me about TikTok and how it would bring me “joy.” I don’t know if that’s the exact word I’d use for its impact on my life, but one thing I noticed during the pandemic was the rise of “productivity” influencers on the app (and all the others).
These were mainly women (on my feed) who preached the gospel of bullet journals, apps like Airtable and Notion, and various expensive, but beautiful, planners that would allegedly save my life. It wasn’t that we were living through an unprecedented global pandemic during a presidential administration teetering on the edge of sanity and fascism that was making me wake up feeling panic. It was my like of a game plan for each day carefully scripted in beautiful handwriting in an as-yet-unpurchased planner! Before my exposure to this, I thought I was doing well simply by virtue of the fact that my now wife and I were living and working in a small apartment together without killing each other. These videos suggested that even my pandemic days had to be minutely organized. It was not enough to run my life based on a series of post-it notes strewn about my desk like a rogue investigator (me) trying to solve a crime (my life). I had to make the best of the “found time” working from home now afforded me. I should be getting in more workouts, cleaning my house, and pursuing multiple side hustles all while killing it at work and maintaining self-care practices.
The pressure of this felt insane!
I began to see videos of the same influencers and became fascinated by their performance of having it all together. In part, this may be because that’s a feeling I’ve rarely felt. Also, there seemed to be a lack of self-awareness or maybe purposeful delusion that allowed these women to genuinely believe that using a planner offered a powerful means of controlling their lives. If it got written down, it was getting done! Daily planners caught on when we started to emphasize self-regulation and self sufficiency in our society, so it makes sense this would be the intended consequence. What’s missing, however, are all the things that planners don’t capture that make it difficult to cross off some items on our to-do list.
Many women would talk about navigating the difficulty of work and child care at home, of finding time to do chores, cook, or even maintain basic household admin, for example. Even maintaining a planner is work. Bullet journals don’t create themselves. Planners also can’t add more hours to the day, or money to your bank account to afford help with chores or childcare.
Seeing the limitations of planner life and the pressure these women put on themselves, I’m still somehow convinced that a Trapper Keeper would change my life, ease my burdens, and be the perfect little treat for any day ending in “y.” This may be because my social media serves me ads for planners and binders that are both adorable and offer the fantasy of control if only I’m willing to engage. This reminder or false suggestion that it’s just my choice to use these things that will lead to the feeling of control I want is so seductive and so insane. Ultimately, I can’t ignore the reality that marketers target women in particular as the perfect customers for a daily planner. However, we live in a world that rarely plans for us. We are often tasked with doing it all when that goal is simply impossible.
The system is unfair in a lot of ways, and me not using a planner doesn’t really feel like the protest I want. I think it would just mean I never show up at doctor’s appointments on time and forget when my projects are due.
I think the reframe I want with my planner obsession is not to continue to add to the box of still-unused notebooks and planners I have (and swear I will use!) or even to continue to buy new ones that I believe will change my life. I don’t even want Tom Hanks to send me a bouquet of sharpened pencils either (though I would accept). After all, he did bring Meg Ryan soup when she was sick but was also gaslighting her online and ruined her business. Hard to know how to feel about that now (even as I love that movie).
I want to remind myself when I wax nostalgic about my former planners that it is okay to be a planner who maybe can’t always control the plan. There are so many things in life that can alter the structure of our days and weeks without warning (both good and bad). Meeting Anna radically upended my then plan for my life in the best way, and chronic illness has altered it in harder ways. What is helpful is reminding myself that planners help me navigate hard systems not of my making and unfinished to-do lists are totally fine.
If it’s possible to be pro-planner but anti-productivity culture, that’s where I’ve landed. Conveniently, this position still lets me buy planners and stationery and school supplies and continue to dream of what’s next as only kids on the first day of school can. That is my favorite part of a daily planner, it presumes a future you can plan. Even if we know that’s not true, and things like pandemics and gendered discrimination in everyday life alter it, it’s nice to hold a tangible symbol of hope in our hands.
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