The Year is Ending and You Want to Buy a Fancy Planner Diary. But Should You? EXPLAINED

Colourful with bursts of productivity. This is what a paper planner reminds us of – right before the year ends, people want to have a planned year ahead. And so we buy diaries – pretty, elaborate, and often…expensive.

But it still makes sense to many, because planning makes us feel like we have more control over our lives.

It also makes one curious, however – when did humans start using paper planners, and why do we still love to use them, in the thick of the digital age? News18 explains:

The Digital Planning Culture and Business Around It

According to a 2020 report by Wired, planning has grown into a massive online community over the last decade, with 5.5 million mentions for #planneraddict and 4 million mentions for #plannercommunity.

Paper planners, commonly regarded as schoolyard tools, are a multimillion-dollar industry, at least in the US. According to the most recent figures as mentioned in the report, the planner industry made $342.7 million in sales in 2016.

The History of Planning

The Wired report traces the first recorded use of a planner as a tool in America to Colonial America, when US’ Founding Fathers such as George Washington would weave blank pages into almanacks, those annual collections of calendars, weather forecasts, tools for financial calculations, political essays, and planting dates calculated based on the movement of the planets.

Washington kept diaries for each journey, as well as daily logs detailing his difficulties planting tobacco and notes on his slaves and employed artisans. These elements were incorporated into daily planners, first by Robert Aitken’s self-proclaimed “first American daily planner” in 1773, then in basic ones carried by Union soldiers, and finally in the Wanamaker Diary, sold by the eponymous department store from 1900 to around 1971.

In addition to advertisements for the store and the brands it sold, the Wanamaker included historical facts, poems, recipes, seating charts for popular theatres, and dates for social events across the US.

Why Use Paper Planners in the Digital Age?

“It’s a way for me to stay organised without being distracted by my phone,” Alexandra Porter, a New York City-based independent art adviser told the Wall Street Journal.

“Some people enjoy the ritual of writing an entry. There’s more formality to it,” Cora Hilts, co-founder of Rêve en Vert told WSJ. “It’s great to plan a dinner date with your friends.” She claims that writing down an impending event helps her remember it.

And psychology may well play a role in it.

Unfulfilled goals and tasks that persist in the mind are referred to as the “Zeigarnik effect,” after a Russian memory researcher. Consider having difficulty falling asleep because your mind is working on the presentation you know you need to write in the morning, explains a report by Laura Vanderkam on Medium.

According to one study, when students were asked to make a plan to complete certain personal tasks, they were better able to focus on reading a novel than when they were simply asked to think about the personal tasks they wanted to complete. In other words, once a plan was in place, their minds could move on to other things, the report states.

Control…But With a Dash of Consumerism?

However, with the many options available for planners – even in India now, the consumerism debate comes to the fore.

There are so many planner formats available online, and so many designs, with high prices.

Even in the US, the ‘planning culture’, mostly on Youtube, is racked with debates on whether consumerism is destroying the crux of the community, and that the various forms of planning are even implementable in daily life.

Even though planning is primarily about functionality and creativity, it is also driven by a retail machine in which companies, both large and small, must continue to produce product and influencers must continue to generate content, the report by Wired states.

And the multiple planners and sticker books aren’t free. A lot of Planner World is about becoming a better version of yourself and achieving your goals. But it’s also about having the best collection of stickers or pens… or purchasing a new planner that will finally bring you peace, Quinci Legardye writes, adding that ‘it took me a few months to resist the urge to buy a new botanical sticker book for $19.99 or another planner that I didn’t need after seeing multiple influencers (or Squad members) decorate with the same stickers.’

So, Should You Buy a Planner?

If you want to, yes. But there’s not always a need for a complicated or fancy one.

As long as you come up with a format that works best for you, it doesn’t matter if you use a worn down diary, a simple, or a flowery one to jot down those thoughts.

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