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LIVING BY THE BOOK | PAGE 3 OF 3
The design for Smith's "crazy book" was inspired by Benjamin Franklin and the proverbial little book he carried, in which he reminded himself of his 13 Virtues and wrote of higher pursuits and long-term plans -- a practice to which he attributed his protean accomplishments throughout his life. In the TimeQuest seminar, Franklin is covered briefly and superficially, in the manner that Americans seem to like their history: Look at how much he got done! He becomes a one-dimensional mascot for the company -- a book-toting prophet of sorts. Franklin Covey has a more interesting, and perhaps more meaningful, tie to a real-life 19th century prophet: Hyrum W. Smith is a Mormon, his great-great grand-uncle is Joseph P. Smith, founding father of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormons are the creators of a world-famous genealogical archive, and have a general "passion for accurate records," according to "The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions" -- and just what is the sum total of a Franklin Planner life, which amounts to hundreds of pages stored in specially designed binders, one for each year, if not a meticulously detailed chronicle? One of Hyrum W. Smith's maxims is a curious mix of touchy-feeliness and executive-style pragmatism: "Inner peace is having serenity, balance and harmony in our lives achieved through the appropriate control of events." With such a self-starter approach, it's little surprise that the Franklin Planner, with its standard-issue pages of institutional pastel green, is largely geared toward business people. Throughout the Franklin Covey catalog, sample pages from Planners show countless notes on staff meetings, performance reviews, flow charts, survey results, annual reviews and memos. Ann Marie Morris told me that the key to the Planner's success is in "how it creates balance in life by keeping the personal and the professional in one place." In other words, Franklinites conceive of everything in their lives, work and non-work, within the brisk, businesslike format of the Planner -- writing down dreams and desires along with notes from benefits meetings and lunches with project leaders. Franklin Covey has keyed into and capitalized on this fluid relationship between the individual and the corporation, this blurring of lines between the professional and the private. In the seminar, the process of identifying, prioritizing and clarifying your governing values is seen as creating a personal variation on a corporate "mission statement." Horton showed us how life can be pictured as a pie chart, just like a budget or a survey, with slices for health, family, career, spiritual, community, education, finances and emotions. To live life, apparently, is to efficiently manage all those slices, just like a profitable and productive business. The fundamental equation on which the Planner is built, we learned, is that more control equals less stress equals more productivity equals more self-esteem. That end "product," if you will, taps into a predominant concept in business (and the larger culture) in recent years. Of course, the real bottom line is the third element, individual productivity, which also happens to enhance corporate productivity. The self-esteem bit is just so much gravy -- but it sure does makes employers look concerned, which is always a good thing. Moreover, it's not so surprising that Franklin Planners and other productivity boosters have become so popular in an era of corporate downsizing, in which it's a matter of course to urge employees to work "smarter" (i.e., do more with less). In the '50s, that golden age of economic expansion, social thinkers wondered if individualism was getting swallowed up by the corporation; now the individual is to be modeled after the corporation. He is the CEO of his own "highly effective" self -- or, as suggested in "Brand You," an article in Fast Company magazine last year, a valuable product with his own unique brand. My misgiving about the Franklin Planner is that, if used as directed, it seems that you put so much of your life into it that there's not much left in you. You don't live your life, you live your "life plan" -- or rather, you conduct business as a microcorporation whose product is a "full life experience." And maybe the fact that you're so organized and achievement-oriented makes you more focused on the organization and achievement than on yourself and those around you. Maybe you plan yourself into a well-regulated, highly effective stupor. Maybe the Franklin Planner becomes like lithium, your highs and lows brought into line with the little kick you get from checking off a successfully completed task. Even if there's a family crisis, Hyrum Smith soothingly tells you, on the tape, how to deal with it so that "you're still in control. The bottom line of the use of this book is control." And so your life is parsed into the days of the Planner, days in which you wisely fill all your time, yet without things getting frantic or out of control -- or rather, things might get out of control, but you don't. You create a systematized history in the Planner, transferring your memory to it; in fact, according to Smith, you don't have to remember anything, because it's in your Planner. After using it for 21 days, he promises, "You'll not only scare yourself, you'll intimidate everybody on your block!" (Picture the neighbors, chatting over the back fence: "That son-of-a-gun Joe, he's so organized it makes your head spin!") After using the Planner for the rest of your life, you might not recall what you did -- but you'll have shelves lined with fat, leather-look binders, filled with hundreds of carefully cross-referenced pages, that can tell you what you can't. I wonder if the children of dearly departed Franklinites will save these archives. As for my own Planner pages, they're now tucked into my battered old Filofax -- a somewhat lame disguise that indicates my ongoing ambivalence about the System. I was not a 21-day convert, nor have I established a set of Governing Values and Long-Term Goals . That's not to say that the Planner hasn't been quite handy in other respects: As a freelance writer, I found it helped in writing this very story and managing the busywork involved with getting other stories done as well. But some of my days have big chunks of white space reserved for "working" -- which, as any freelancer will confirm, involves significant amounts of procrastination. How do you plan for that? The true Franklin acolytes have a solution for this and probably for every other excuse I could come up with for my slack planning skills. I've heard several, and don't want to hear any more. But I'm wary of getting too close to the System. When I start to scare myself, as Smith puts it, then I'll know my addiction to control is getting out of control.
Julie Caniglia is a freelance writer in New York. Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and talk about Franklin Planners, PalmPilots and other "personal digital assistants," personal information managers or whatever you call the things. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E L A T E D_S T O R Y : PalmPilot reading -- Robert Rossney on the allure of the little black box. |
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