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BY JULIE CANIGLIA | Can you really "have it all" simply by having it all in your planner? That's what I tried to find out by chucking my battered Filofax and submitting to the rigors of the Franklin Day Planner -- "the ultimate lifestyle management tool." I was partly motivated by journalistic curiosity about how something so trivial as a day planner inspires such fervent devotion in its users -- who get hooked on a "System" that, to everyone else, seems shrouded in cultish mystery. At the same time, I was reluctantly (and furtively) wondering if maybe there was a better way to be organized -- something more than confetti showers of Post-Its, or legal pads covered with dense, secret-code-like scribbles. The Franklin Planner is the best-known product from Franklin Covey Company, formed out of the merger last year between Franklin Quest and the Covey Leadership Center (the latter's namesake, Stephen Covey, is the author of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"). Even before the merger, Franklin Quest was a big corporate success story. The company now has 121 retail stores and projects $550 million in revenue for fiscal 1998. It trains 750,000 people each year and estimates that there are a total of 5 million Planner users. In addition to the Planners, Franklin Covey offers a host of "professional services" and "product solutions": books, tapes, CD-ROMs and seminars that make up a self-help/training/management-consulting empire along the lines of Anthony "Awaken the Giant Within" Robbins. Franklin Covey claims a long list of Fortune 500 mega-corporations among its clients; indeed, most Franklin fans are introduced to it through their workplaces, where they're often standard-issue office equipment, along with desks and computers. Franklinites can rely on low-tech paper notebooks or ramp up as far as they like on the high-tech spectrum, using Ascend software to extend the Franklin method to their PCs, Macs and PalmPilots. But whatever technology you adopt, the Franklin Planner requires some learning before it starts working miracles. "Until you've had some instruction on it, you'll find that the Planner is really nothing more than an oversized date book organizer," says Franklin Covey CEO Hyrum W. Smith on an audiotape that comes with each Planner. "There is a great deal more to the Franklin Day Planner than just keeping track of appointments," he promises, in a voice as folksy as his name. Indeed, if used as intended, the Planner becomes the hub of one's entire life. Its pages contain all activities, as well as relationships, thoughts, beliefs, dreams, desires and plans for five or six years into the future. More than a mere organizer, it's close to a religion. In the Franklin Covey faith, organization is a means to salvation. Hyrum Smith developed the first Planners in 1984, meaning that nobody has yet grown up with one (although, like cigarette companies, they're working to get kids hooked with specially designed agendas). Therefore, becoming a Franklinite means tossing out dearly held bad habits and exposing oneself to a new "system." For many, the first step toward that conversion is the strongly recommended eight-hour "TimeQuest" seminar ($199). A couple of months ago, I took the plunge. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T_P A G E .|.
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