Is Your Planner the Scariest Book You Own?
Your planner and calendar are the best mental health tools you may not be using.
Why is it that, for so many people, using a planner and calendar is so scary? Opening that nifty planner you got online— you know the nicely bound book with a calendar inside, as well as boxes for daily, weekly, and monthly goals— becomes like opening the Necronomicon to hellish feelings of dread, anxiety, self-criticism, and hopelessness. It’s there on the desk… staring at you!
As a therapist, I have realized how powerful the humble planner is, for experiences of both good and evil. That is, it can either be the tool of your best self, or it can open up a hellmouth of bad feelings.
But if you can manage to slay the demons preventing you from using one, a planner transforms into a wonderful tool for confidence building, managing moods, and everyday success. These are a few hacks designed to get you past your initial fears.
The Scary Side
First, why are planners so intimidating? To use schema therapy terms, I would say that opening a planner potentially triggers a few different modes.
(Recall from an earlier post: a mode is a kind of mindset or self-state that we flip into. Schema therapy suggests we all have a few different modes that help us cope, some helpful and some problematic, with the healthy caring adult mode as our ideal of a best self who helps usher the other modes along to well-being.)
When opening a planner, we may trigger the punitive inner critic mode, reminding us of all the ways we have failed in the past, raising feelings of shame or guilt.
We may feel the self-loathing of a Surrender Mode, agreeing with that self-criticism and saying, “just accept it—you’re lazy and you can’t do it.”
We may feel the Impulsive child mode triggered: “you don’t have to bother with this BS when you feel like doing something, you’ll do it.”
Or on the other end of the mode spectrum, we may feel the stress of the overachiever mode, who tells you to schedule too much and overwhelms you.
One of the most challenging modes I work with is the detached protector, a mode which makes us forget we even have a planner! “I keep intending to use it, and but it slipped my mind.”
A Tool for Good
Once we are successful at overcoming the unpleasant feelings a planner can trigger, we can see it as a tool with real potential to make us feel better. I see the planner as the tool of the healthy caring adult mode. (And no, being a “healthy caring adult” doesn’t mean being robotically super organized and perfect.)
Imagine having a coherent sense of what you want to accomplish for the day or the week or longer, accepting realistic limits to what is possible, believing that if you don’t accomplish a task today, you will get it scheduled and done another day, and even boldly planning tasks you thought were beyond you, like reading a book a week.
I’ll go further: Imagine using your planner to guard against overcommitting to others, and to include personal tasks you previously didn’t take seriously, such as exercise, meditation, or a class (“I just don’t have the time.”)
I also suggest that my clients use a planner as a mental health tool: set a notification for daily mindfulness, or to check in with what you feel at a body and emotion level, to ask yourself if you’re being too demanding, to remind yourself to be kind and empathetic to yourself and others. Using a planner is about assertiveness, dignity, and good boundaries, as well as compassion, self-understanding, and self-esteem.
Success with a planner doesn’t happen overnight. The secret is that it’s more of a marathon than a sprint. It’s a practice yielding little rewards daily and weekly, and big results over longer periods. Here are some pointers to help keep a compassionate, patient focus on goals without getting caught up in feeling like you’re failing:
Through experimentation, you will find the right planner style for you. If you realize you aren’t happy with the format you have, scratch out categories, or lists, and make your own. Don’t be intimidated by the format you’re stuck with.
Don’t get overambitious: plan for breaks, rest, and the unexpected.
Understand that planners are aspirational: not perfect, but approximations that take practice to get right and always flowing.
Take small steps: start with planning what you already do, then slowly introduce new activities.
Practice predicting how much time different activities take.
Create the major activity categories in your life (fitness, social time, work, etc.) and how many of them you want to fit into a day and a week.
Interface with your smartphone: use alarms to remind yourself of appointments.
Slowly introduce larger life goals such as learning new skills, reading, or journaling.
Make dates with yourself to check on your planner every day and once a week. These are good moments to make sure your written planner and phone calendar are synced.
Planners are a great opportunity to overcome perfectionism, feel more agency about how you experience your time, and be more accepting of the flow of life. And in schema therapy, this is what we call being a Healthy Caring Adult for yourself.
