Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

In Praise of the Weekly Planner

Last week a client told me that she’d bought a planner for 2022. She’d been using digital calendars for years, but she felt that sometimes technology failed her and things were falling through the cracks, so she thought she’d go back to the handwritten week-at-a-glance agenda. As much as you might think that I’m anti-paper, I’m not and in fact, I totally support her switch.

Things stick in our brains better when we write them down rather than enter them into a digital calendar. My husband is always amazed that I have no idea where I’m working the following week without looking at my digital calendar. He, on the other hand, makes his calendar with a ruler and a piece of printer paper, and he can tell you everything he’s doing for the next six months off the top of his head.

I use a digital calendar for my appointments with clients and doctors and places I have to be, because it’s easy to keep it with me and I can schedule the next appointment on the go. But I use a weekly planner for my to-do list on my desk. It can be messy, but there are a few advantages to paper in this case:

I’m able to sprinkle my to-dos throughout the week, putting them down for a day it seems likely I can accomplish them. It seems silly to put a note to pick up a prescription on my digital calendar, but if I write it down for Tuesday, I’ll see the note on Tuesday morning and remember that I’m doing that when I get off the subway in the evening.

Also, I get to cross things off. It’s satisfying to sit down on a Sunday morning and see all that crossed-off stuff. What isn’t crossed off might be things I can handle right then, like entering an address that I wrote down during a phone call, stuff that became moot—school sent the link to parent-teacher conferences, so I don’t have to ask, say. Or maybe it’s tasks that just didn’t get done and I need to move them to next week.

It’s good to keep track of the small stuff you accomplish. Sometimes it feels like nothing’s getting done, but if you can look back and see all the things you did accomplish, you might feel better about yourself, and you also might see where your time is going.

Here’s another key benefit to using a weekly planner: It can help eliminate bits of paper. I use mine like a notebook, scribbling things down as I go, and you can paper-clip the invite or flyer for an upcoming event to that day so it’s there when you need it. It may seem old-school, but it works. Remember, entering stuff is work and takes time, and digital space is space too.

So, don’t be so quick to eliminate paper. It has its advantages and charms. You can’t really doodle in iCal, and we all need to doodle sometimes.