“Bring letter to Luisa.”
That’s the first thing I thought I was supposed to do this week—before my “8:30 a.m. stop at the training room” or my “11 o’clock class.” I remember, because it’s the first thing written down on Monday, Sept. 21, 2015, in my day planner. It’s hard for me to imagine how someone could function without one. Would that letter have ever made it to Luisa if I hadn’t written it there? Well, probably—but I can’t be very sure. I can’t imagine my life without being able to put it on a page. This may sound upsetting, like I’m flattening the colors, textures and dimensions of my life, but I’m not. I’m just making sure I don’t miss them or forget them.
I never throw away my planners in hopes that, someday, I’ll look back through them and I’ll remember what a past me did in an ordinary week. In a way, my planner is a documentary of the mundane. It’s a diary without any speculation. It’s literally what I did and did not do. It’s all that I expected of me, and conversely, in what’s not written, is the story of what I didn’t prioritize. I hope that someday it’ll be interesting to see how that has changed, or how it hasn’t.
Sometimes I hate my day planner, though. This week it’s quite messy, with three different colors of pen attempting to make a neat, orderly schedule for myself. When I write things down, when I put them all in one place, I feel certain that they will happen, because it lets me see the pockets of time I have in a day. It makes me confident that I won’t forget. I love plans, but I also hate them. I make them for myself everyday, every week, and then I spend the consecutive days in my week pushing back against them, finding ways to weasel my way into doing things differently than the plans specified. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I’m writing this article at 9:30 a.m. on Friday morning. My planner says I’m supposed to go pick up my course books right now. Maybe I’ll do that later, maybe I won’t. I wonder why I wrote it there. It’s not like I particularly need those books for today. I think I write things like that down because there’s a part of me that likes to think I can predict my life for myself. There’s a part of me that likes to think I can control all the things I have to do and make them my own by writing them down. By putting these things in my planner, I have agency over them. No, maybe I can’t choose whether or not I am expected to do them, but I get to choose when I do them. This small penciled-in choice makes me feel like the things I have to do are mine, and that is important to me. I never want to start doing things that aren’t mine to do, because I think that’s how people become unhappy.
My planner is chaos. It’s a vortex of check marks and third-grade boy chicken-scratch handwriting. It’s scribbled out commitments that get moved to a later day or taken off the list, but that’s why it’s so important. When I put everything there in my planner, it doesn’t bind my life down—it opens it up. It shows me what I can rearrange and how. It shows me that I don’t have to go get my course books right now, but I can if I want to. Or I can write, which is what I’m doing now, instead. I can take advantage of my spontaneous ideas and know that my plan and all of my commitments will remain unperturbed.
Why use a planner at all then? Why not just let the chaos unfold? Well, I like to think of it like this: my plans aren’t linear. They’re a mosaic, in which pieces can shift around each other. When I write things down, when I put my life on a page, it doesn’t stop moving but it lets me see what and how things are moving. It’s hard to keep everything in your head. And no, I don’t always check things off like I hope to; I scribble them out and move them to Thursday, and this frustrates me to no end, because sometimes it feels like the plan never ends. However, at least it is my plan and the things I put in it are mine. Yes, I have to go get course books because a professor requires them, but the reason I’m going to go get my books is because I decided to write it in my planner.
I use my planner to make my life mine. I plan for me.
