It started, Kara recalls, the first week of January 2023. “I had a new planner” — a classic black Moleskine — “and I went to get it out of my tote bag one night, and it was just soaked. My travel cup leaked, and it was just — the pages were already wavy. I was annoyed at myself, but it was literally a week old. I didn’t lose much.”
Kara uses her planner for a lot of things — appointments and deadlines, her kids’ school and after-school schedules, to-do lists and notes to self. There are addresses and phone numbers; lists of books to read and shows to stream. She doodles in the memo pages and writes down funny things she overhears. She tucks dry-cleaning tickets and receipts into a folio inside the back cover. “I thought, well, maybe it’s time to size up. Let me see what’s out there.” Two weeks later, she hadn’t found a replacement. “I got stuck in the rabbit hole. I started watching comparison videos and setup videos and all this planner stuff I didn’t know existed.” The choice was overwhelming, she found, but also alluring: “I never thought about needing a planner system, but then it occurred to me: Maybe it was exactly what I needed.”
Beautifully composed photos of weekly and monthly spreads are posted under tags like #planneradict, glowing out from various screens, hand-lettered and illustrated and so perfect they could be on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel being passed from God’s hand to Adam’s.
As the rabbit hole got deeper, all the shortcomings of Kara’s faithful Moleskine were suddenly glaring. There wasn’t enough space allotted for each day, for one thing, and the one bookmark ribbon meant she had to do a lot of flipping through to find the page she was looking for. “I realized how much of what I work with are things I’ve settled for.” She saw so many planners that could better optimize her days: specific layouts for budgeting and meal planning, dividers to separate months, blank pages in both the front and back. Every time I thought I’d found it, I had FOMO. I started second-guessing myself.” Kara had fallen hard into Plannerworld.
Plannerworld comprises everything having to do with planners on every form of social media. “Plan with me” videos on YouTube let you watch, from the creator’s POV, the “setup” of a new weekly spread, a meticulous process that involves blocking out parts of days with washi tape, filling out weekly habit trackers, writing reminders of people to call and things to remember. Unboxing reels on Instagram introduce systems you’ve never heard of that you realize look perfect. Beautifully composed photos of weekly and monthly spreads are posted under tags like #planneradict, glowing out from various screens, hand-lettered and illustrated and so perfect they could be on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel being passed from God’s hand to Adam’s. And always, there are effusive comments: “Obsessed. Drop the details.” “Is this better than the [different planner system]? Can you post a side-by-side?”
If you spend a little time in Plannerworld, you’ll know your A5s from your B6s. You’ll develop strong opinions on paper weight, vertical vs. horizontal alignment and whether the week begins on Sunday or Monday. You might, hypothetically, end up buying a sheet of tiny blue-foil stars on Etsy to mark the days you go to the gym. You’ll almost certainly have at least one favorite gel pen, and buy it in multiples in case it gets discontinued. But if you spend too much time in Plannerworld, you can get hypnotized, glamored. You might be convinced there’s a planner that can change your life, one that is perfect — that will make you perfect. You just have to find it.
I’ve used paper planners my whole life, though I called them “datebooks” up until I got my first Filofax and felt like I needed to level up. In the years since the advent of personal digital assistants and then smartphones, this has prompted more than a few comments — things like “I haven’t used one of those since 1998” or simply, “Wow, you use a planner” in a tone also applicable to someone waiting to withdraw money from a bank teller when the ATM is right there. When the trusty black rubberized Filofax I bought my first year out of college began falling apart years later, I had a revelation similar to Kara’s. Why had I put up with a three-ring binder — the natural enemy of left-handed people — for so long? I didn’t have to live like this!
( TIZIANA FABI/AFP via Getty Images) Notebooks of Italian notebook manufacturer Moleskine are laid out for sale in a store in central Rome.
What followed was a string of happy years with a perfect-bound planner embossed with the year in gold. It was the one — that is, until it was suddenly discontinued. Several years of road-testing other options followed, most perfectly good but just not it. And then: the descent into Plannerworld that began with doing some innocent research and turned into what felt like a quest to find the magical object that would keep my to-do lists checked off, my appointments unmuddled, my life streamlined and graceful.
Paper planners’ noticeable comeback in the mid-2010s made total sense. At a time when so many of us lived our lives on or in front of a screen, planners scratched an analog itch. People reported remembering things better when they wrote them on paper rather than tapping them into a keyboard. There were no pop-up windows to close, no ads. Just as e-readers didn’t kill the book industry, smartphones didn’t kill planners. And like reading a physical book knowing it wouldn’t be interrupted by a sales pitch (Enjoying this book? Here are 15 others we bet you’ll love!), planners had a quiet, satisfying utility with none of the surveillance that became — despite promises to the contrary — the internet’s new normal.
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The planner industry was another story. A new breed of visually grabby, aggressively cheerful new planner systems hit the market all at once around 2015, among them the Happy Planner (“Add some happy to your schedule with planners made to fit your lifestyle”), the STARTplanner (“Pairing aesthetics, motivation, and meshing business and life into one physical product that you can’t just shut off”), Appointed (“Beautiful tools inspire beautiful work”), Cloth & Paper (“luxury planners and stationery designed to support focus, intention, and wellbeing”) and Papier (“Invit[ing] magic into the everyday with premium paper treasures for every desk.”) Far from the utilitarian, all-business products from At-A-Glance or Franklin Covey, these weren’t taskmasters: They were life coaches.
The ones listed above all came to market roughly a year after the launch of a U.S. Department of Agriculture “research and promotion” initiative called the Paper and Packaging Board. Its purpose, according to the USDA website, was to “maintain and expand existing markets and develop new markets for paper and paper-based packaging.” It’s not clear how many of the buzzy new brands were products of this initiative, but by the end of the 2010s, anyone in the market for a planner was spoiled for choice.
It was a definite vibe shift in a market that previously prioritized efficiency and function rather than personality. The new class of planners, by contrast, were all personality: Encouraging and positive, they often used words and phrases like “motivate” and “manifest” and “you got this!” — not in their packaging and marketing, but in the planners themselves. And they were targeted at women, who in hetero marriages and partnerships tend to be the ones carrying what’s called the mental load: Keeping track of school holidays, remembering when to restock the paper towels and pet food, scheduling appointments with the pediatrician and the dentist. These pep-talking planners were meant to cover a life that regularly moved back and forth between the outside and the inside, the corporate and the domestic realms. And they were ready to affirm the hell out of you.
In 2016, the New York Times reported that sales of physical planners had increased by 10% between 2015 and 2016, for a market valued at $340 million. Less than 10 years later, it was a billion-dollar business. On her Instagram, Emily Ley, the founder of the planner system Simplified®, referred a 2019 survey by the Paper and Packaging Board that found “64% of millennials prefer paper and pen to digital tools for keeping organized and planning their lives.” The sales figures didn’t include the rise of market for planner supplies: Markers, highlighters, stamps, insertable dividers and folios, page markers, washi tape and, most notably, stickers.
The new class of planners were all personality: Encouraging and positive, they often used words and phrases like “motivate” and “manifest” and “you got this!” And they were targeted at women, who in hetero marriages and partnerships tend to be the ones carrying what’s called the mental load.
Happy Planner sold books of stickers sized for their planners; Ban.do’s and Rifle Paper’s came with a sheet or two of them. These stickers were made to mark different activities, and were amped about every single one. Haircut? Hell yes! Date night? OMG! Rent due? Don’t forget! Vacation? Sun’s out, fun’s out! They tracked habits: a drop of water for when you hit your recommended daily amount, a sneaker to record getting your steps in. They made planning feel like more than planning — they made it feel like wellness.
This is where Kara started to stall out in her research. There were so many systems and so much possible customization — planners could be outfitted with templates for budgeting and meal planning, pages designated for gratitude and bullet journaling. Defining one’s planning personality made for even more personalization: An organized planner might have one setup, a creative or results-oriented or big-picture planner three others. “I was like, I don’t know what my planner personality is. Should I?”
There was also the issue of a learning curve: Systems that users made sound easy were sometimes inscrutable. You might find what seemed like a perfect planner, but then watch a YouTube video about it and realize it was a lot more time-intensive than it seemed. I let myself be convinced by Instagram to purchase a planning system designed specifically for people with ADHD. Its value proposition was several different page layouts, but I didn’t realize how not intuitive they were until I saw them in person. More than 10 years after planners came roaring back, the market is saturated but still pumping out new options: as many options as there are years in a life, possibly more.
The feminization of planners is, like so many other consumer products marketed to women, a series of mirages. They join the cosmetics and hair products and workouts and meal plans whose siren songs constantly beckon: This is the thing you’ve been looking for. A friend of mine remembers a specific moment of clarity: “I was agonizing over trying to identify the perfect planner. And the person I was with said maybe the perfect can be found in the consistency of always using the same one, never wasting the time to see if there’s a better one out there. She was right.”
I share this bit of wisdom with Kara, who receives it with a slight grimace. “I just started buying two and returning one. I know it’s not about the planner.” And yet, there will always be that mirage, the planner that shimmers on the horizon, always out of reach.
