Back in April, deep into a YouTube budget-planning rabbit hole—an attempt to minimize my pandemic agitation by exerting what control I had over my own corner of the world—I came across a woman named Alaina. She was walking viewers through the planner she had created, showing the debt-reduction tracker and the financial goals page, talking about how to create a daily, quarterly, and yearly money routine. I was fascinated; her method of tracking every aspect of her finances was so different from my approach, which involved avoiding it altogether until I received a credit card bill or a low balance alert.
I watched all of her budgeting videos. Eventually, I clicked on one titled “How I Use My Happy Planner.” Her hands were moving quickly over the pages, turning them, pointing out different sections, gesturing along with her explanations. She had clean, tiny handwriting and used cute stickers: a cloud in a dark blue bubble for a chance of rain that day, a little wallet next to “budget review,” a little laptop on her schedule, across from a to-do list. Then, onward to the business planner.
Wait, I thought, you have more than one planner?
She had eight: catch-all, business, budgeting, home, personal, faith, notes, and reading.
Hypnotized, I watched her flip through all the planners, trimmed down into sections of a binder and hole-punched to fit on shiny metal rings. I was astounded by the discipline required, the amount of control she had over her time and task list. She could turn to a page in a book on her desk and know exactly what to do with the next hour of her life. I wondered if I'd just stumbled on the most productive person in the world.
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When I was a kid, I would observe aunties, teachers, and movie heroines—what they did every day, how they moved through the world—seeking a glimpse of what adult life was like. I saw glamour, accomplishment. Alaina (@theorganizedmoney) reminded me of that vision. I liked getting to know her by seeing what made up her day as an accountant, entrepreneur, and mom.
Was the sense of control I saw in her videos learnable? I searched a phrase that kept coming up in the titles of Alaina’s videos: “plan with me.”
A vocabulary revealed itself. A world of planner obsessives opened up. Plan With Me’s, I soon discovered, were videos of people demonstrating the art of decorating and accessorizing their bound paper planners. The pages came in many layouts: horizontal, with seven paragraphs of plain notebook lines; vertical, with three blank boxes descending down the page for each day; dashboard, with lists for what to do and what to buy each week; hourly, with timelines from 5 am to 10 pm. Now to decorate. You might go spare, and just lay down a few icon stickers for work meetings and the kids’ activities. Or you could go ornate, with dozens of colorful boxes and flower stickers. Your approach might depend on the space you need for planning and the format of the page. Are you working on a typical weekly spread or a travel plan with packing checklists? A memory page with personal pictures or a blank week you might use to practice hand-lettering?
The decorative planner babes were the women (most planners I encountered were women, but there are also planner men) who decked out their planners with so many stickers that the lines on the pages disappeared, hidden by colorful boxes that could handle their short lists and reminders and also coordinated with the flowers, leaves, animals, fruit, or colorful shapes that matched the week’s theme. Functional planners favored layouts that featured more ink than stickers; they would time-block their days in hourly layouts, scheduling when they would work, eat meals, exercise, watch Netflix, meet friends. They would still add a few stickers, though, because “making it look pretty makes [you] want to look at it.”
I knew early on I wasn’t a decorative planner. I had tried bullet journaling in a dotted notebook at the beginning of the year but stopped in March when I lost my ongoing freelance work at the beginning of the pandemic and all of my plans dried up. I was bingeing Plan With Me videos during a period when my depression was really bad and I was taking a break from freelance work, so my sense of hourly or daily time had dimmed. Getting my brain in order required more than a blank dotted page; I needed functional layouts more than free space.
I watched videos explaining planning techniques, walking viewers through how planners make special pages, break down big projects into tinier tasks, plan actionable goals. You can also watch reviews of new releases, which come out nearly constantly—either small creators releasing sticker designs every month or the big companies coming out with collaborations with brands and seasonal releases, at which point the brands and their marketing squads put out flip-throughs, and enthusiasts rush to snap them up from the companies’ websites or Michael’s or Joann or Hobby Lobby before they sell out. Influencers do sponsored posts and offer affiliate codes and giveaways between more personal videos.
YouTube is great for explanations on specific layouts and techniques, but Instagram is the place to share pictures of weekly spreads and to converse with other planners. There are so many on Instagram, hundreds of pictures of spreads posted by power planners, walls of color and pen making up their feeds. And on Facebook, casual planners ask for advice on planning and life, small planner company founders and sticker shop owners ask for feedback, and everyone shows off their planner carts and pen collections and meetups and this is the cutest sticker ever and you go girl! and there’s also a convention and podcasts for all this—
“It’s a lot,” planner influencer Desiree Perez tells me after explaining how involved she is in the planning community, what I call Planner World. She decorates multiple spreads a week, runs popular Instagram and YouTube channels, promotes for Happy Planner, one of the largest planner brands, works a full time job as an administrative assistant, and presumably sleeps at some point. “It is a lot, but I really, really enjoy it so much.”
As I absorbed the details of planning culture, I kept expecting to suddenly want to turn away. In the past, when I’ve discovered subcultures that had whole languages and practices (think BTS Army or Big Brother fandom) I would ultimately write them off as not for me, that it would take too much to learn. Plus, I was (and remain) pretty skeptical about all those pretty spreads and inspirational “plan a better you” quotes. Surely it was a veneer? I wondered how much real talk could really exist in a world of constant self-improvement, especially one in which the primary outreach platform is everything-is-perfect Instagram. Mostly I was afraid that I would see a planner post about racism or depression or fatphobia, and someone would respond that they were being “too negative.” But I kept digging anyway.
And the planner world is huge. Over the past decade, planning has grown into a giant online community, with 5.5 million mentions for #planneraddict and 4 million mentions for #plannercommunity. Paper planners, which are commonly thought of as schoolyard tools sold in Target aisles, make up a multimillion-dollar industry. The most recent figure—and it’s safe to assume the numbers have only grown—has the planner industry showing $342.7 million in sales in 2016. Planning grows from a productivity tool to a hobby to a lifestyle for thousands of women every year. These women gain a sense of control in a chaotic world by planning as much of their lives as they can. Even in a year where no plan is safe from the pandemic, and no industry is safe from racial uprising, life doesn’t stop, and planners gonna plan.
The history of planning is the history of journaling, storytelling, pen, paper, scheduled events, anticipation. Someone, long ago, made a note of something that was going to, or was supposed to, happen. The first recorded American use of a planner as a tool dates back to Colonial America, when Founding Fathers including George Washington would weave blank pages into almanacs, those annual collections of calendars, weather forecasts, tools for finance calculations, political essays, and planting dates, calculated based on the movement of the planets. Washington would keep various diaries dedicated to specific journeys, along with daily logs detailing his difficulties planting tobacco and notes on his slaves and employed artisans. These components were incorporated into daily planners, first in 1773 by Robert Aitken’s self-proclaimed first American daily planner, then in basic ones carried by Union soldiers, then in the Wanamaker Diary, sold by the eponymous department store from 1900 to around 1971. The Wanamaker included historical facts, poems, recipes, seating charts for popular theaters, and dates for social events across the country, as well as advertisements for the store and the brands it sold.
Paper planners and the advertising around them skewed determinately male during the ’60s and ’70s. Imagine something similar to a Moleskine or a Leuchtturm: black leather, coil- or spine-bound, blank except for lines delineating months and weeks and maybe boxes for check marks. Or something for students, with an attached ruler and printed multiplication tables. Brands like FranklinCovey sold planners as efficiency, needed for the business executive to get ahead. Women needed efficiency too, of course, but managing the kids, cleaning, and household finances wasn’t the industry’s priority.
When the ’80s shoulder-padded career woman emerged to take over the corporate world, she carried a Filofax binder, with a colorful cover and pockets and an address book section and no-nonsense inserts—smartphones for the corded-phone era. In the ’00s, women started creating their own planners, and planning became conflated with the paper crafts and scrapbooking industry, making planning an aesthetic exercise as much as an intellectual one. Women added photos and stickers to the blank areas of their planner pages to infuse them with more of their personal life and memories, and eventually entire planners were dedicated to home and personal life. Creativity and art is now entwined with paper planning so much that bullet journaling has even been coopted by artists. Search #bulletjournal on Instagram, and you see more posts of hand-drawn layouts and arabesques than of the sparse to-do system invented by Ryder Carroll.
Now that books, calendars, and work itself (thanks Zoom) are almost fully digitized, the rise of paper planners seems inevitable. Planner fans use iCal and Google calendars, too, of course, for the purpose of sharing schedules, but digital alerts and to-dos that disappear after they’re completed make the sense of accomplishment just as evanescent. Writing a task down on paper helps it stick in the brain, and a long list of crossed-out to-dos shows the day’s accomplishment.
The women (and men) in the decorative planner industry grew up on Lisa Frank notebooks and Lilly Pulitzer. The books they use are high-quality, thick paper that take pens and paint with no bleed-through. When I buy books, I rub my hands over the covers, and I delight in turning the pages; I once bought three boxes of a pen I liked; in high school, I created a Choose Your Own Adventure book as a final project: This habit seems made for me. I might find coral and neon-green accents slightly ridiculous, but I can be swayed by a pretty flower sticker. Plus, even though a “Just Be Happy” sticker feels like a challenge—like every stressor can easily be ignored and succumbing to it is my fault—a saying like “Just Trust the Process” can sneak up on me and lift my mood.
It took awhile to get into the habit of writing everything in my brain down, but now I start my day by opening the planner, seeing what I already have to do, and where I can fit in tasks that I enjoy. It gives me a sense of care and luxury. And it feels like meditation: My head empties and clears of stress. And the act of placing a sticker, placing the bookmark, feeling the lack of scratch as the pen glides over smooth paper, also feels like care. The care that went into designing the planner, caring for my schedule, caring about my mental state. When I write down my to-dos and schedule out my day, it’s a way of being nicer to myself, not having to rush tasks I forgot or stress that I’m not getting enough done.
Most planners got into paper planning during a time of personal upheaval, or when their schedule became overly hectic. They tell stories of cross-country moves, demanding jobs, military schedules, and loss of a spouse. They all turned to planning either to help their mental health or to get a handle on their lives.
“The only reason I got into planning was, at the time, I was working two jobs, and for one of my jobs the hours were all over the place,” says Perez, who is a member of the brand Happy Planner’s 2020–2021 Squad. Through the Squad, she receives products from Happy Planner to promote, and she gets mentoring from veteran Squad members. “I was really missing creativity. I was working, working, everything was technology—you're on computers all day long. I just missed having some kind of creative element in my life, and planning gave me that creativity back, but it also gave me the function that I really needed to get things, like, in order, so it was win-win, since I'm doing something functional, but it's also fun.”
The Plan With Me videos Perez posts consist of her decorating her planners (usually vertical layouts) with stickers based on a weekly theme. She uses an elaborate decorating process, testing sticker placement on see-through wax paper before placing them onto the layout, cutting off ends that go past the border with an X-acto knife. By the end of each video the page is fully decorated, and she stops before filling in the page with her plans, disregarding the functionality of the planner and leaving the viewer awash in aspiration. Maybe their planner can look that beautiful too. Watching her decorate and hearing her thought process is very soothing, the way makeup tutorials are soothing: I reach a place of calm by focusing on watching her decorate, and it activates my brain’s creative center. It makes me want to write, or draw, or cook.
Perez, who has 30,000 followers on Instagram and 11,000 on YouTube, has a day job, but the planning she features on her channel is mostly about personal errands. Before entering Planner World, I had only ever equated planning with work, whether the stuff I had to accomplish within a 9-to-5 or the projects I have to juggle as a freelancer. The only list I had ever made for anything personal was a grocery list or a list of books I wanted to buy. Once I bought a printed packing list, but I never filled it out. Planner babes, though, get to the point where they’re scheduling what time during the week to have free time. The first time I saw a time block for laundry, something in my brain imploded. That’s one thing about merging into a community: If there’s something you can’t do or don’t understand, and everyone else around you can, you feel like there’s something wrong with you. It took a few months of looking at videos of beautiful house-cleaning-routine spreads and feeling overwhelmed at the idea of doing an hour’s worth of domestic work every day before I accepted that all I have the capacity to plan right now is work and my budget, and that’s OK.
I also can’t deny that consumerism is a huge part of planning. Even though planning at its purest is about functionality and creativity, it’s also powered by a retail machine, where companies, both small and large, need to keep churning out product and influencers need to keep generating content. And it’s not like the multiple planners and sticker books are free. A lot of Planner World is about being a better you—accomplishing your goals. But it’s also about having the best stickers or the biggest pen collection … or buying a new type of planner that will finally bring you peace. There’s an inherent FOMO in seeing multiple influencers (or Squad members) decorate with the same stickers, and it took a few months for me to suppress the urge to buy a new botanical sticker book for $19.99, or another planner that I didn’t need.
The collective hope of the community is that, at the bottom of the planner rabbit hole, planner babes will emerge as more effective, relaxed, and fulfilled versions of themselves. Many planners say that writing down their schedules and tasks frees up their brains and takes away their anxiety. That’s what I was hoping for when I first got sucked into the idea of planning my life to the last second. I eventually realized that I value flexibility, and having a hard stop time for completing a task makes me freak out too much. I don’t want to plan my entire life, but having my work and finances figured out has given me one less thing to worry about in the middle of an unending pandemic, when the world’s on fire.
For a community that prides itself on fostering friendships between people from “all walks of life,” Planner World still has its blind spots. There is no official demographic data for planners, but the most popular influencers and the heads of the biggest companies tend to be white. Of course there are planners of color and BIPOC-led companies with huge followings. But during the social upheaval in the wake of George Floyd’s death, more and more Black planners started speaking out about inequality within the planner community. Their feelings of being passed over felt harder to ignore.
Megan Payne and Myra Powell have been planner friends since Powell introduced Payne to planning in early 2019 when they were working together at an insurance company. Even after the two left the company, Payne, who now works as a teacher, would be the person Powell called to discuss happenings in Planner World (new releases, company drama, planner layouts), and vice versa. The two started their discussion podcast, Planners and Wine, soon after the racial upheaval taking place around the world reached the planner community. They wanted to speak out.
According to Payne, there’s a lot of diplomacy in the planner community, and people are often afraid to step on each others’ toes or criticize companies they’d like to work with in the future.
“So we finally got to the point right around the time that George Floyd was murdered that we were like, forget this. If nobody else is going to say it, we need just hop on and say it,” Payne says.
As with many communities, you can look to Instagram to see the effect of the Black Lives Matter movement on Planner World. Many planner companies and influencers participated in #BlackOutTuesday, and planner influencers started posting Black Lives Matter planner spreads in the days after. Companies primarily promoted Black planners, and influencers bought from Black-owned planner companies and sticker shops, branching out from their loyalties to specific brands.
This is a sharp change from what Powell has felt as a Black planner trying to grow her YouTube channel to reach more viewers. Before May of this year, she would notice that white planners tended to have larger followings and more opportunities for sponsorship. Though she would remind herself that her channel would grow at its own pace, it was difficult for her to see influencers who started around the same time surpass her.
"The word that I can describe the planning community for women of color was just invisible. We kind of combined together, and we support each other, but there would be plenty of times where you would see a white planner babe get started around the same time you did and skyrocket. Tens of thousands of followers within the same time frame doing the same stuff. Most of the time you don't even see our faces, we’re just showing our planners, but the black planner babe will still be at a thousand followers,” Powell says.
There’s no way to determine why a casual planner follows certain influencers. Contributing factors could include using their preferred planner, having the same style, enjoying their stickers. But even in a video focused on a bound stack of paper on a plain desk, bits of personhood creep in: jokes show personality; voices are higher or lower, with vocal fry or accented. And so much shows in the hands: wrinkles, marks, rings, polish.
When I started watching planner videos, I upped my hand care. I’d never focused on my own hands moving before; my eyes follow the words I type or write. But after watching Plan with Me’s, I can no longer assume that the hands are the invisible instruments for words. Or art, building, cooking. They’re always there, and to onlookers the skin color may always influence their opinion of the planner.
“I think it has to do a lot with both conscious and unconscious bias," Payne says. "Sometimes [companies are] intentionally choosing white women over women of color and Black women, because they don't see us in the community, even though there's no reason not to see us. They have just chosen not to see us. And sometimes it's that unconscious bias.”
Multiple criticisms and scandals shook the planner community after Floyd’s death, all of them touching on that question of conscious or unconscious bias. Black planners who’d had enough of being ignored scrutinized multiple companies’ marketing squads. Those who had similar or the same number of BIPOC planners year after year were accused of recruiting based on quotas. Happy Planner was criticized for an Instagram post that planners believed used language similar to All Lives Matter; it later apologized and deleted the post. American Crafts, a paper craft company that makes stickers and washi tape, was put on blast for not having any BIPOC presenters on its past 10 annual squads. After the criticism, American Crafts added three Black planners to its 2020–21 design team.
Then Erin Condren Designs nearly got canceled: Its namesake founder helped organize a graduation march for her children’s high school class that went against social distancing guidelines and occurred amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Condren assured in an apology posted on Instagram that the march was “in no way registered, associated with, or guised as a [Black Lives Matter] protest.” However, it was a clear workaround to an LA County ban on gatherings that had effectively canceled the school’s traditional graduation ceremony.
According to Payne, who’s been planning since early 2019, dilemmas that come up regarding Black representation is a wider-spread problem than most would admit.
“It's a lot of these other companies who are not run by women of color or Black women. They didn't even realize until it was too late. And now they're having to harshly come to the conclusions that, if they just would've had somebody like us in the room who could have explained it to them or who they could have listened to, they could have avoided all of this. So that's their own consequences,” Payne says.
Now that planner companies are reckoning with calls for more diversity, support of Black-owned companies and Black influencers has gone up. You could argue they are reaping the benefits of the demand for more Black representation, but that’s not a planner-specific concern. With what I’ve garnered through casual conversation and Twitter, a lot of Black people are questioning whether it’s really good to have increased opportunity when it was prompted by police brutality and white guilt. Is the new follower or sponsorship genuine support? Or another type of objectification? As I write this, I imagine so many voices, including my own, saying, “I mean, I’ll take it, but … ”
As time goes on, as protests become the new norm, activists fear that Black Lives Matter will be diminished to just a slogan; they are concerned that antiracist movements within various communities and industries will survive only if the right voices stay loud and keep fighting. For planners, that’s voices like Planners and Wine or the companies that actively amplify and partner with Black creators.
Then there’s the question of whether this really is the new normal, whether once the economy opens and the protests get less press, everything will go back to the way it was before. Will the move to virtual existence and this summer’s social upheaval become a forgotten anecdote, a themed notebook that sits in the back of the drawer?
Payne doesn’t think so. “We wouldn't let it go back to how it used to be with no representation,” she says. “We just absolutely would not let it go back to that. And I don't think anybody that we know, even our allies, would just let it go back to business as usual.”
I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of the planner community. The planners I’ve spoken with are open to the “real talk” I’ve been seeking: They acknowledge the issues in Planner World and refuse to sweep concerns about representation, consumerism, and toxic positivity under the rug. Planner founders and CEOs seem sincere about the importance of diversity. But the choice is still mine: If this moment becomes ephemeral, if “just be happy” becomes the standard response to racism, I will stop supporting whoever takes that stance. There are so many planner companies that I can choose those that are owned by women of color who actively support these issues. No matter what happens in the community, my day’s going to start with opening a paper planner.
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