They introduced agendas when I was in third grade. Using them was a school-wide requirement, with time built into the day to fill them out. I remember it vividly: during the morning, we would sit facing the wall, where the projector displayed a transparent version of our planner page, filled out with the day’s activities. Usually it was sort of hard to read – the curse of stubby dry-erase markers – but then again, so was my handwriting, so who cared. It was how we started our day, following a morning warm-up activity, because filling out the agenda was how we knew what we’d be doing during the day. If we had homework, we had to write that down. At night, we were required to have our parents sign off on the day’s agenda, a measure of accountability, a means of telling on yourself when you really hoped you could “forget” a take-home assignment.
I don’t remember when the mandatory aspect of agendas lapsed, probably middle school, but the moment they weren’t required anymore, I stopped using them. Throughout high school, my mindset was “writing stuff down is for suckers,” and procrastinating was the only way to live. But that changed in college. Not because of school itself – I went to ASU, where even in the honors college, our unofficial motto was “Ds get degrees” – but because I started to do stuff. I had plenty of activities and extracurriculars in high school. But they were either family-led, which meant I didn’t need to keep track of time because I had my mom, or they were nestled within the institution of school, so they were highly-regimented and required no time management from me. But in 2013, when I was in college, I started hosting a weekly poetry slam, and in 2014, when the Individual World Poetry Slam came to Phoenix, I stepped into the role of volunteer coordinator. Suddenly, I had to be in charge of work and school and my creative life and my social life.
And that’s when I bought a planner.
A whopping nine years ago is when I first fell into the social media abyss of #plannerspo #deskspo #studyspo, the “inspirational” corners of Instagram and Tumblr where writing in your planner is as much an aesthetic choice as pastel hair or vintage clothing can be. I don’t remember how, but I found a very trendy and wildly expensive agenda called the Day Designer. It was only available online. Looking back through my email, I found the correspondence, dated August 2014, from when I emailed the founder of the company to ask if they had any “perfectly imperfect” planners with misprints or damage at a discount. I placed an order for the gigantic planner and then had to PayPal the entrepreneur who was selling them $49.00 before I could get the shipment. At the time, I couldn’t find another planner that had one full page for every day, broken down into an hourly format. I’m fairly certain that someone bought me the planner as a gift, but honestly, I may have been so ashamed by the high price tag for a damn notebook that I didn’t tell anyone. Once it arrived, I did two things. I covered the boring, black-and-white cover in a collage. And I filled out every page.
During the long slog of IWPS season, when I was often awake from 5am to 2am, I used my planner to obsessively chart out every second of my day, and it worked. Then, through finals season, I kept using it, finding value in having a physical extension of my still-fried brain. And then, I started doing comedy, so I was back to drawing in late-night timeslots whenever my day extended beyond 10pm. It helped.
When the Day Designer ran out, I didn’t buy a new one. The planners had become more popular, which meant there were new, cute covers, but it also mean the price had gone up. Instead, for Christmas in 2015, I begged for a Rifle Paper Co. weekly planner. I was a real asshole about it for some reason – I was convinced my mom would not buy me one, despite having never gone without literally anything ever in my whole life – and when I finally had it, I felt frustrated whenever I used it, because I was cramming a full day’s worth of information into two-page weekly spreads. From there, I moved on to an undated planner from Urban Outfitters, which had a daily layout but was also from a UK company, so it was in 24-hour format. No.
2020 hit, and I was suddenly grateful for the undated planner. But writing in the dates proved to be a pain in the ass, once I started going places and doing things again. I switched to a $13 Amazon knockoff of the Day Designer, which had a plain butcher-paper cover, which I covered in a collage just like my first, dull Day Designer. It was flimsy but worked well, when I remembered to use it. In late 2022, I got a $6 planner from TJ Maxx because I felt like it, and I used it to plan my newsletter, to plan my poetry submissions and my job applications, struggling to squeeze everything into the weekly format but delighting in all the additional budget-focused pages and the included sticky notes. It was a weekly layout, but it was fine because I didn’t feel like I had that much going on.
And then, in spring of this year, I started a new job in the middle of wedding season and my book release, and thought Oh, man, I want the Day Designer again. Enough time had passed that Target now carried it, in a variety of cute colors and patterns, and at a price point under $20. Since I am savvy, I waited for a sale, and got exactly what I wanted for $6.99.
It’s the academic version, so it technically starts in July, but it has monthly spreads for May and June that I’ve made good use of, and I binder-clipped in some printed pages of the daily layout so I could start planning my days right away. The thing I’m really proud of, though, is the color coding. Last year I started implementing a color code into my reading notes. I use certain Post-It flags and highlighters and pen colors to indicate certain things (“use this for newsletter!” or “look up what this word means” or “buy this book they reference”).
Well. Now, I have a system for my planner, too, which takes my obnoxious hour-by-hour plotting to the next level. Was it all a scheme to expense some brightly-colored Pilot pens? Maybe. Has it served as an excellent visual tool for prioritizing my time and shifting gears in between activities? Why yes! Yes it has.
I can already see, for example, that July and October are both big travel months for me; as such I will not agree to any more activities that require me to use dark-blue pen on those months. And on every day that has enough free space, I’m adding in bright-orange “writing life” activities. In an ideal world I will have at least an hour block of orange on every page. Work, whether it’s day job or freelance, gets coded in green, so I remember there is money in it. And I have the color code on an index card which I can bring to the start of every month as I move through the planner. It’s simple but effective. Oh: there are stickers.
I’ve tried my hand at using a digital planner exclusively over the years, to absolutely no success. Something always happens. I run out of phone storage, I accidentally turn off notifications, I don’t like the layout because it’s ugly. Usually it’s the last one! You can probably tell by now that the cuteness of my organizational system is vital to my actually using it. Why would I look at a calendar if it’s ugly?
But I’m experimenting with the Structured app, as a supplement to my paper planner. This seems like a good fit because it allows you to customize the color scheme of each entry, so I can match it to my daily to-do list, and it has pretty fonts, and there are little icons for every task, making the whole thing even more cute. To customize the notification settings, including the sound effect, you have to buy the premium version of the app; we’ll see if it’s worth $10/year for me to hear a twinkly sound instead of a plain ding-dong. So far, though, so good: I can easily add the biggest priorities from my planner into the app, and make sure I have notifications turned on for meetings or phone calls or leaving the house on time.
This is the system that works for me, at least right now. I am not the kind of person who sits down with a candle and a glass of wine and a “relaxing instrumental folk covers” playlist on Sunday nights to plan her week. I’m a person who, on the train, digs out her planner and her bag of colored pens to jot down YANKEES GAME!!! in a calendar square, then hit it with white-out when she gets home to re-write it on the correct date. But I’m a big believer in choosing the tools that work for you and making use of them however you have to. If I haven’t changed in nine years of being a planner dabbler, I’m probably not going to change much now. Instead, I’ll plan around my idiosyncrasies and my mistakes, in the brightest ink colors known to man, with as many stickers as it will take to get me there on time.