Most don't think about it, but aside from finding the best productivity planner for ourselves, the very paper planner (a/k/a agenda, diary, journal, scheduler, notebook) didn't even exist until roughly 90 years. What did humankind do for the prior millennia upon millennia?! It wasn't until Gustav Grossmann came around with his own 200-page manifesto and leatherbound planning notebook in the 1930s, that the modern organizer was born.
Today, we who pay attention to our productive lives take it for granted at the plethora of options for planners on the market, as well as learning how to use them effectively. In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team discusses the factors that make the best productivity planner the right one for you.
(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/062 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)
Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!
If you'd like to continue discussing managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).
In this Cast | The Best Productivity Planner
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | The Best Productivity Planner
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
History of Day Planner
Levenger Circa system
FranklinPlanner
Staples Arc system
Day Runner
Apple Reminders
Remember the Milk
OmniFocus
The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future by Ryder Carroll
Casts referencing BuJo:
035 What Is the Bullet Journal? How Does It Work? – ProductivityCast051 Managing Digital Notebooks047 Reflections on Getting Things Done (GTD): What I Wish I Knew When I Started GTD, Part Two – ProductivityCast024 Can Productivity Be Fun? – ProductivityCast022 Productivity Pet Peeves – ProductivityCast016 The Power of Reflection – ProductivityCast013 Getting Unstuck! – ProductivityCast
Time Design (Time/System)
FranklinPlanner
Panda Planner
Freedom Journal
Productivity Journal
Five-Minute Journal
Volt Planner
NeuroPlanner
The High Performance Planner (Brendon Burchard)
Commit 30 Planner
Revo Journal (caveat: site was not loading, or loading very slowly, when we were trying to visit it: http://revojournal.com/)
Travelers notebook
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
Read More
Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Francis Wade 0:20I'm Francis Wade.
Augusto Pinaud 0:23 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Art Gelwicks 0:24 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25 Welcome, gentlemen to this episode of productivitycast. And today we are going to be talking about something that a lot of people use every day. But they probably don't give very much attention to it. And so the people who are listening to this podcast you listening to this podcast, are you probably more aware of the concept than not. But I thought what we would do today is we would talk about the productivity planner, the what we would call a personal organizer, or a day planner, that idea of something that helps you organize your day, your week, your month, your year. So on. To start us off, what I thought I would do is read from an article that was called the day planner by and Schmidt and I'll put a link to this in the show notes. Because I I actually highly recommend you read the full article. But basically, it's a little bit of history of the development of the day planner by this gentleman good stuff Grossman. And what I'm what we're going to do is talk a little bit about the history, I just want to read a little bit of this as a background and precursor to cover why the personal organizer came about and, or how it came about. And then we will get into a discussion on different types of planners that are out there. What really makes a productivity planner, great what what really sets one apart from from the other for you and your own personal productivity systems. And then we'll talk about some of the personal productivity planners that are on the market today. There are actually a plethora of them, and each of them are unique in their own right. While we won't do a full comparison today, at least piquing your interest in terms of the options that are available. So let's start off with the day planner, by and Schmidt just a small segment of it. She writes here, quote, in its beginnings, the planner wasn't much more than a bunch of loose pages size a five held together with some binding. The Economist, industrial psychologist and ex advertiser Gustaf Grossman, published a leather bound version of this predecessor to our modern organizers and time management systems in the 1930s, and wrote a 200 page User's Guide to go along with it detailing how buyers were supposed to use the binder book in the most efficient way. Consumers could personally order the planner with users guide from Gustaf Crispin himself, and it seems that more than a few of his contemporaries did so self employed as an advisor, occupational coach, and author word of advice literature since 1927. Grossman also sold a planner set in the decades after the Second World War. I'll just go on to the to the next paragraph and then I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the article, which is I think, very interesting. But going on, quote, Grossman conceived with the day planner, as an instrument that was supposed to support its users on his path to growth that is, so long as it was used in accordance with the User's Guide. It did this by helping him lead his life in a rational way. And part of leading one's life in a rational way, was the right kind of emotional self conduct. I would like to discuss how the day planner was supposed to assist ambitious individuals live a happy life by getting them to organize their feelings in a particular way. To what extent could writing down wishes and keeping track of engagements give rise to feelings that enabled users to constantly increase their productivity? How are users supposed to better themselves climb the ladder at their jobs achieve economic success, and thus achieve happiness simply by using the day planner in the fashion prescribed by the user's manual? Which feelings did Grossman see as being necessary and why? Which feelings was the use of the day planner supposed to generate? And which was it supposed to block out and quote, and so I will leave it there for you, I will pique your interest to go check out what Gustav Grossman expected of others in the way in which they were to use the manual. And this is really, as an Schmidt said, this is the precursor to the modern day planner, this idea of having a booklet that was basically blank pages, and a highly detailed set of instructions on how to manifest it. And we've come a long way from that artifact to today, where we basically have these planners, these organizers that are pre printed with instructions for how we should organize and manage our calendars, our events, and our tasks and projects. What's your history, what, when, and what types of planners have you used in your systems over the years,
Augusto Pinaud 4:55
I was never a big paper planner, my first planner that I can recall was cash to Data Bank, okay, that has a little keyboard kind of, I think was two or three lines of a screen. And that was my first the first product that I use similar to to a planner, at some point, I carried Morrison notebook, dinosaur planner, 11 years circa that allows me to move pages around and carry my notes and all that. So most of it, at least on the early ages was digital, I went from that Casio to was called Palm Pilot professional stay on lb for many, many years, then went to iOS. That said, I have worked and helped coach many people into making this planners work. And more recently, especially with technology and how technology, you know, has an important roles on everybody live understood really is so dynamic that there are certain things that are hard to keep up on. On a paper planner, I tend to advise people to keep the paper planner more for reflection point i connection between the speed of input and the ability of processing, that actually carrying a paper planner as they was intended at the beginning, especially the Franklin gobies and those things.
Art Gelwicks 6:27
Yeah, for me, it's easier to say what ones I haven't to use than the ones that I have. Just because it for the longest. I mean, I literally have cedar chest full of notebooks. It's just that bad of a sickness. I've been using paper systems for forever. I mean, ever since I was in, I want to say junior high school. Yes, I'm, I'm a geek, I'm okay with that. But those those types of systems regardless of which frankly comes day timer, day planner, you name it, staples arc. To me, it always came down to two brackets, they were either planner systems that were structured, or planner systems that were flexible.
