Analog Planner Love

Keeping it Together--The Old-Fashioned Way

Photo by Bich Tran from Pexels

It’s that time again—time to start looking for an agenda, a planner, a date book, a hard copy calendar. This booklet will remain one of my closest confidantes for 365 days, never far from my reach. It’s something that I’ve tried digitalizing and have never succeeded. I need to feel the weight of time in the palm of my hand, to turn the page at the end of a week, to leaf through the months and dream about what adventures lay ahead.
 
It’s an important purchase, one that I do not take lightly. I peruse bookstore shelves to paw their offerings and keep my eyes open in museum shops. I’m always on the lookout for the perfect planner when I travel and sometimes I browse online: limited runs of radical daily planners with feminist quotes on every page, fancy agendas with high-resolution photographs taken by my favorite artists, planners with a poem a day or a new recipe each week. For some reason, I never see the same agenda twice, meaning that each year is a new aesthetic experience.
 
It’s a highly personal purchase, and not one that I would ever leave to anyone else. A few years back, I received an agenda from a friend as a gift, and it was surprisingly perfect! I couldn’t have chosen a better one myself; I was amazed. I recently purchased an agenda for 2020 made by Paulo Coelho, one of my favorite writers, with “revelations” from his many books scattered throughout. While I love the concept, one thing irks me about its design: each day is on its own page, making it impossible to look at the week ahead with one glance. I’m testing it out, but I don’t think it’s the one. I’ll have to keep looking…  
 
Why haven’t I digitalized? Not having a smartphone for so long (I was a late, late adopter, getting my first one in summer 2017) made it unwise to keep my calendar on an app that required the internet. And even if it is accessible without Wi-Fi, I’m always trying to limit my necessity to turn towards a device, so keeping my calendar analog just made more sense. I’ve faithfully kept planners every single year since I was a high school student, so at this point, I think the habit is too engrained in my life to break. And it’s one of those habits that isn’t terrible for my wellbeing, so I think I’ll keep it.
 
Of course, I’m not able to input yearly reminders for dates that never change, like birthdays and anniversaries. This makes me bad at remembering birthdays and anniversaries. I haven’t yet developed an analog system to help remind me, although I do keep a running list of important dates in my address book (my second favorite analog tool), which I rarely remember to look at.
 
My mother’s habit of keeping absolutely everything did not skip a generation; I follow in her hoarder footsteps, but hopefully with a bit more organization (and digitalization). As a kid, I remember rifling through boxes in the storage shed and coming across these gems: daily planners from the years before she became a mother, giving me insight into the person she was and the life that she lived before I was born. Sometimes, she’d write notes about important happenings, like the New Year’s Eve that she met my dad, and the days that he called during their courtship while he was traveling abroad.
 
In my father’s belongings, I’ve found his own collection of planners as well as detailed log books from his many trips at sea as a sailboat captain. Now that I’m writing a book about my father’s early-onset dementia and my role as caretaker during these last few years, these log books and planners have become insightful guides. Paging through my father’s planners from long ago makes me smile as I remember the trips we took together and the memories we shared—the man he was before dementia overtook his mind. But seeing his shaky handwriting in the last planner he used—2016-2017—makes me sad as I can see the insidious ways that the illness is beginning to infiltrate his mind, and his world.
 
As I work on this book project, my own daily planners have become essential lifelines as I think about the events of the last few years. It’s where I marked down my father’s doctor’s appointments and where I took notes during those appointments to share information with the family. My planner became my most trusted tool as I advocated for my father and navigated the tangled web of our health care system; important information was at my fingertips, like the last time he’d been hospitalized and an up-to-date list of medications. My planner allowed me to stay organized amidst the chaos.
 
Even before this book project, I’ve always liked to browse through my old planners whenever I come across them, usually during moves. As an inherent memoirist, I’m always scouring ancient material to reflect on in my writing. Paging through these planners, I like to remember what activities were taking up my time back then: dancing salsa, teaching undergraduates, exploring a new country. Sometimes it feels like I’m peeking into the life of a different person living a wholly different life.
 
I know that many of my contemporaries live by their Google calendars. Every time I get a Google calendar invite, I pen it into my planner. My partner has two or three digital calendars organizing his many work meetings, often with people from around the globe. In his case, an analog agenda would be too cumbersome to maintain. Unlike the very private quality of my planner, with notes about how I got sick on a certain day or when my period arrived, his calendar is a public tool that can be viewed by colleagues to decipher when might be a good time to squeeze in a chat. My professional landscape looks nothing like his highly regimented schedule, meaning that my daily calendar is a mix between work and play, public and private.
 
As I leaf through old planners and peer into days long past, I’m grateful to have this memento, however mundane my days may have been. 

Tip of the Week

To piggy-back off last week's tip (only use social media on desktop computers vs on the app and always sign out of accounts), one of my readers wrote in with a tip on how to take social media passwords to the NEXT LEVEL. 

Jasmine wrote: "Make your password for social media a reminder or affirmation to think through whether you really want to check. “IsFBthebestuseoftime?!” is both a pretty solid password and makes you check in with your feelings on the subject!"

Thanks for the awesome tip, Jasmine!

Digital Life Around the Web

When there's no money for college, why not move into a van with your pet snake? "The Vanlifer Who Broke Youtube"

I really enjoy Jocelyn K. Glei's podcast, Hurry Slowly, and appreciated her latest meditation about how becoming a brand doesn't allow room for personal growth. 

In an effort to conduct "extreme vetting," the Trump administration forced visa applicants to disclose all social media account handles (including pseudonyms) -- and are now being sued for it. 

Tumblr's first year sans porn; it barely survived. 

If you enjoy this newsletter, please forward to a friend.
Thanks for reading!