New Planner Fever

What are the tools that can help us imagine & create a new, decolonized relationship to time?

Journal pages with excerpts from Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance.

I’m a die-hard paper planner girl at heart, and just generally a true slut for stationery and art supplies. One way this manifests is that, periodically, I am gripped with an intense desire to find a new planner system. I’ve been going steady with my current planner since early 2020, so it had been a while since I caught New Planner Fever.

The Fever seized me hard this September, the holiest of months for paper planner nerds. This is when many large brands have huge content drops for the coming new year, and when I got caught in the frenzy of Hobonichi’s new releases for 2023. (That’s my new A6 Cover & Planner set pictured above.)

While I’ve always been enamored of planners and analog supplies, I am fairly new to the world of Japanese stationery supplies, with brands such as Traveler’s Company and shops such as JetPens and Baum-Kuchen, and with the corresponding myriad Instagram accounts with “paper”, “plans” and “planner” in the handle. Stepping into this world really changed the game as far as planner options, because customization to your exact needs is the ultimate goal, and the products that exist to create your perfect set-up are seemingly endless. (As opposed to, say, walking into Target or OfficeMax, picking a planner off the shelf, and calling it a day.)

In the weeks that I spent uhm-ing and ah-ing over the gorgeous & elaborate planner set-ups of strangers in Insta, trying to discern and divine which combination of covers & inserts would feel right for me, a creepy feeling started to settle in my stomach: I realized that under the sparkly veneer of creative expression & personalization, so much of what I was seeing as far as how people use their planners seemed to be in service of a colonized relationship to time, of grind & hustle culture.

My thinking and feeling around this topic in the last few weeks has been deeply inspired & informed by two sources: the Substack essay The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture by Anne Helen Petersen, and the book Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey, known to many as The Nap Ministry on Insta.

Petersen’s essay calls out “fetishizing organizational planning” as one of the ways in which we internalize & perform a relationship to time that is steeped in capitalist values: linear, predictable, optimizable, and, ultimately, one that is ideally designed to extract the maximum amount of labor & productivity from ourselves.

Through the commitment to busyness and its organization, we inscribe and reinscribe a certain understanding of time onto our children, onto each other, onto ourselves. We discipline our messy, distracted, inquisitive, emotive selves into the most valuable possible forms of human capital possible. We suggest that sort of regimentation is not only possible (just organize harder!) but aspirational. (Emphasis mine.)

I was seeing this all over the (stunning, curated, soothing) images I was seeking out on Insta during my Planner Fever-induced research. Most of the images I saw were of tidy & meticulous planner spreads, the color schemes often tending to the same uniform cream and toffee tones. I was struck not just by how neat and perfect everything looked, but also by the sheer volume of information what folks were painstakingly keeping track of in their systems. No task seemed to be going undocumented, no experience unmemorialized.¹

As I continued to seek a prescription for my planner fever (sadly, more cowbell did not help), I noticed myself having fairly strong, contradictory responses. While part of me felt overwhelmed and defeated by the multitude of different planners & notebooks being used, and by the voluminous amount of data that was painstakingly being tracked by my fellow planner nerds on Instagram, there was also an undeniable part of me that was finding all of the images of neat, color-coded planners deeply soothing.

In true Carrie Bradshaw fashion, I couldn’t help but wonder: Do I find these images of intricate planner systems soothing because they meet a true, authentic need, rooted in pleasure & joy, or are they soothing because they quiet my anxiety about not doing enough, because they give me an illusion of control, which is too often a proxy for connection and safety in our productivity-obsessed world?

I am often reminding myself of the words that my journaling muse, Erin Fairchild of Journal As Altar, repeats in her Insta posts, her workshops, and her excellent Substack: This is a freedom project. Our journals and planners don’t have to be a space in which we practice strict obedience to the tenets of productivity culture, exerting the same control over our time, tasks, and hobbies as we as expected to exert over our bodies, extracting ever more labor to try to assuage our feelings of unworthiness, even as we continually push off the rest we desperately need. Our journals and planners can be a space in which we practice liberation, in which we imagine, and experiment towards, a vision of time that is slow, messy, expansive, and that serves to interrogate and interrupt internalized capitalism and white supremacy.

In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey makes an impassioned case for the work of dreaming & imagination that is necessary to unhook from grind culture, and to reclaim the rest that our divine bodies are ultimately created for.

This part of our rest pilgrimage calls for invention and practical action. It is deep embodiment with an understanding that we must be ready to make life-changing decisions, establish boundaries, and reimagine the ways we heal. I believe this crafting includes our rest. I spend countless hours daydreaming about what our bodies and minds will be able to figure out and embody from a rested state.

I love how Hersey describes the hours she spends daydreaming as “countless,” a possible rebuke to what Anne Helen Petersen damningly names “Rapid-Growth Capitalism time, or Productivity Fetishist time, or White Bourgeois time.” How would we even quantify and track rest, daydreaming, imagination for the purposes of rigid calendar-keeping? Wouldn’t crossing a nap off a to-do list sort of defeat the purpose of said nap, turning our rest into a productive task to be conquered with a vigorous (and, we have to admit, fucking satisfying) dash?

I entered the soul-searching phase of Planner Fever. What, ultimately, do I want to use my planner(s) for? Two avenues seemed to open up before me: one in which my planner is a place of methodical obedience to the demands that capitalism & white supremacy place on my time & labor, and one in which my planner is a practice of joyously messy resistance to Productivity Fetishist time, a place to invent & embody a relationship to time that centers rest, daydreaming, imagination, community, and care.

Liberation, like nature, abhors a binary, and ultimately the best Planner Fever prescription is going to be a both/and approach, one that honors the fact that I still have to function and make money inside of capitalism, even as I am devoted to uprooting & eradicating it.

One of the biggest themes of 2022, both in my business and in my personal life, has been divesting from urgency, the sense of scarcity around time that capitalism & white supremacy create & uphold. I am cultivating an approach to work and creativity that is slower, more spacious, and more expansive. And, as the wheel of the year turns, and as the treasure of a book that is Rest Is Resistance continues to nourish my soul, I am finding myself even more deepening into practices of rest. I want my planner & journal practice to be tools that support and sustain this exploration.

There is so much pressure to be complete, to have arrived. Capitalism elevates product over process, and this impacts everything having to do with our relationship with ourselves, from how we perceive our healing journey is going (are we there yet?!?) to what planner set-up we use. While I did finally settle on a combination of planners that I think will work best for me (more on that in the Resource section,) ultimately the only thing I am fully committing to as far as cooling down this Planner Fever is experimentation.

This is somewhat of a reductive statement, but planning is often a strategy to avoid feeling. If I can plan ahead for the perfect day, week, month, quarter, in such a way that gives me an illusion of control, in a way that promises that I can adhere to the stringent expectations of perfectionism and productivity (the two go hand-in-hand) that capitalism and white supremacy demand of me, then maybe I might be able to bypass the discomfort of figuring out the needs of this unruly, messy, ungovernable body. If I can plan perfectly, maybe I can avoid the pain of embodiment.

“The body is a site of liberation” writes Tricia Hersey in Rest Is Resistance. If we’re going to interrogate, interrupt, and upend capitalism and white supremacy, we need to be vigilant about the ways in which we uphold their tenets in our own bodies and our own lives. Planning for productivity doesn’t make space for the surprise and serendipity, the imagination & dreaming practices that will be necessary for our collective liberation.

We cannot plan our way out of capitalism & white supremacy. We cannot plan our way out of trauma. We need to dream our way out. We need to create our way out. We need to feel out way out. We need to rest our way out. We need to experiment our way out. We need to paint and draw and sing and fuck and dance our way out.

Whatever planner system I use–because it delights me and gives me joy to use one–will need to accommodate the ever-evolving needs of this joyously unruly, deliciously rebellious body that capitalism & white supremacy cannot own. In abandoning the idea of a perfect planner system, I can embrace my becoming and evolution, moment by moment. I can create and invent a new way of being out of paper and pens and paint and stickers and stamps.

I have no way of knowing if my new planner system will work–truly, we never do. But I do find a lot of relief in knowing I don’t need to know. I can be open to the mystery. I can meet myself where I am in each moment, attune to my body, heart, and soul, and use my pages as portals² into the liberation I want to embody.

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CURRENTLY RESOURCING WITH: A weekly roundup of shit I’m enjoying.

🌈 For the planner nerds: I have (I think) settled on the following combo for 2023. One of the things that I love about this planner set-up is that it actually fits into journals I currently have and use, so it reduces the total amount of notebooks I will be using on a regular basis.

• Traveler’s Company Regular Size Weekly Planner with Memo inserts in my Regular Size TN, for writing out my weekly tasks lists and appointments (this is new for me, as I typically have favored vertical layouts. We’ll see how this goes!)

• I don’t use digital calendars except for Acuity, so a solid monthly planner is my biggest must-have. Since I also always use an A5 Leuchtturm1917 dotted journal as a bujo for business planning, and content & curriculum development, I’m going to start a new one and make my own monthly calendar section at the beginning. I was really tempted to get this one, which gave me the idea for this concept, but I really prefer the A5 size, and having a hardcover book.

🌈 Seriously Rest Is Resistance is a life-changing book. It is a poem, a prayer, an invocation, a manifesto.

🌈 Related: Tricia Hersey on Glennon Doyle’s podcast.

🌈 This soup ROCKED MY WORLD last week.

🌈 Erin of Journal As Altar is running her workshop Journal As Altar for Healthy Relationships on November 20th.

🌈 “The trying is what heals you.” A resounding FUCK YES to this missive from Nic Antoinette.

Transcending the outcome

1. I don’t mean to throw any shade at all on anyone who enjoys creating these kinds of spreads! What I am interested in is examining the nuanced and complex reactions I have to such images.

2. Another phrase from my beloved Erin Fairchild.