One of those "planner" times

Property of Stormberry

January could be called "the month of planners", though in the planner community, "planner season" happens somewhere between July and October, depending on the brand of planner or planners you subscribe to. During planner season, people who are into planners, such as myself, hunt down the planners they want to use the next year, and usually put them away until the fated date comes when it's time to start using them and filling them up with annual information such as birthdays, anniversaries, start and end of school/uni periods, tax filing days and so on.

In today's digitalized world, this is not a ritual many people have, as digital calendars (or social media) has all the birthdays already in for eternity loaded and programmed into your calendar (until such a day when you have to renew or update your app), and so with all the other days of appointments, due dates and due-payment days you may have to keep an eye on. Back in the day, before the internet and computers were inserted in every aspect of our lives, you know, when a telephone was always a landline, and stayed on a wall or a table, and not in your pocket, most people had this ritual of noting important dates in the brand new planner or on the calendar. Those planners and calendars, as far as I remember, could be found in school and paper supply stores somewhere around December, and not sooner. And most people spent either the last days of December or the first days of January writing in important dates, like birthdays, anniversaries, payments and check-ups that happened only a handful of times in the year.

Though I do know of cases where people used their planners and calendars to annotate certain events of their daily lives - I do remember I was told I should be keeping the record of my periods when I started having them - but in general planners and calendars were used to know which day it was, to calculate past and future days, and to know if you had something to do that day or in the future. If you wanted a record of your past days in more detail, you've got yourself a journal or a diary, which was a notebook of some kind, in which you wrote about your day. Or so was the idea, at least where I live.

With the era of the internet, you started to learn about other people, and how they did things, what they've got and how they used things. In the case of planners, one could find out that some people did use their planners as a daily log, where the book contained not only their plans and appointments for the day, but they also noted how many hours they did at work, the meds they took, or even a small summary of their day. I guess people started finding different practices interesting, cool or inspiring, and soon we were flooded with ideas of how to do this and that. I imagine that this may be were the planner world got so inundated with different practices and interesting ideas, that it may have given the impression to some, that you have to do all of them. FOMO became A Thing.

Soon you started seeing videos and posts in different platforms, about being confused about how to use a planner/journal, or feeling like they failed with this or that planner/journal, and going through planners and layouts multiple times a year and yet feeling like they are not reaching "planner peace". Goodness, in the 80's and 90's there was no such thing as planner peace. You had a planner you've got on December of the previous year and you worked with that. Your only concern was whether you remembered to check it often, and whether you didn't forget to pencil in all of your tasks and appointments. Today there is such a thing as "planner peace" and lots of people don't get to it.

Back when I had a planner channel on YouTube, I explained my mother about it, and she looked at me like I had sprung another head.

"What is there to explain people about how to use a planner? You open it, you write your appointments and then you check it."

And yet, today, in the era of more information than what you really need, and yet not enough of what you actually need, these are valid concerns.

For a while now I have been scaling back on Social Media, and now I'm off YouTube as well. Through this process I have realized something: I have no FOMO. I have a particular taste in most things, and I'm a little harder to impress, and yet, when I was deep in social media and YouTube, I did found myself wanting many of the things I saw. many I did not buy because I am not so easily convinced (so I went pondering a purchase of weeks and then suddenly it wasn't even that hot), but others I did got (like the six of so Kat Von D liquid lipsticks). After several years of watching unboxings, I finally took the step to get a subscription box, only to discover after some time, that this is not for me. For a while, I was also tempted by luxury bags, and had been seriously considering a Marc Jacobs The Tote Bag, since that was the one that stood closer to my preferred style.

And then I stepped off Social Media and YouTube. And I no longer feel the pull of subscription boxes and all sorts of specialized, strange stationery items that are all the rage. Last year, I went twice to Choosing Keeping in London, a stationery store where people make a line outside to enter. Like at an exclusive club. I went, I saw... and in two visits I spent a whopping £15. Two rolls of washitape and one bottle of ink. I was already de-FOMO-ed. I was no longer wanting a Marc Jacobs tote bag for €220, and instead sought out a €18 Merci Gustave tote bag I've got at the CDG airport, which has become one of my favorite bags. Well, not to mention that my already copious tote bag collection (39 tote bags) grew with the addition of three unexpected tote bags: one from Stonehenge, one from Waterstones and one from The Daunt Books. Two due to bag emergency and one because it came with the books. No FOMO, just need or gift.

This has got me thinking whether much of the issues many people have with their planners and journals and the expectations they set for themselves are due to the content they consume online. Do they really, really need to fill each page of a planner? Do they really, really need to journal everyday, many times, in many different books? Does every little thing has to make it into the planner and the journal? Do they really, really need to have X amount of "top priorities" each day? Do they really have to have to do lists that include things like waking up and eating breakfast? Do they really need mood tracks and reading journals, and morning pages and gratitude, and meal prep, and the-Gods-know-what other stuff?

What would Your planner and your journal and your daily practice look like if you were not spending a single minute on social media and content platforms like YouTube and TikTok? Would you find planner peace or maybe would be at peace with your planner?