From 600 Tasks to 8: How Paper Planning Saved My Sanity

“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”

That’s a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don’t want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet.

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Script | 378

Hello, and welcome to episode 378 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

I recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts. 

And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special. 

This week’s question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I’m curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience? 

Hi Phil, thank you for your question. 

Before I begin, I should give you some background. 

My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation” 

A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns. 

Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker. 

I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha.

A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew. 

That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week. 

I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I’d take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel’s balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change. 

It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better. 

Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That’s when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. 

I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools. 

It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution. 

That’s the background. 

So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner. 

Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn’t need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today. 

It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and think if what I was about to do was necessary or important. 

It was unpleasant.

So, I decided to go back and try a Franklin Planner for a few months to see what would happen. 

It was a revelation and I was shocked. 

The first thing I noticed was I slowed down. Because you have to manually write out your tasks and appointments each day, you had time to contemplate whether they really needed to be done. 

With my digital system, I had things like watch this YouTube video, or read this article. Yet, these were not important at all. For some reason the digital task manager elevated their importance because they were on the list and had to be done—which, of course, they didn’t.

I never wrote those down in the Franklin Planner. I might have written them down in the notes area for later, but they would not be a task. 

It was too easy to add stuff to a digital task manager, which meant all sorts of rubbish got added to the list. What that did was to make my task lists bigger and bigger. It got to a point where there were over 600 tasks in my task manager. 

I remember looking at that realising that 80% of what was in there was either no longer relevant or would be a waste of time if I did do them. 

That never happened with the Franklin Planner. The act of writing down tasks, meant you would carefully consider whether it was worth doing or not. 

The result of this transition was instead of having fifteen to twenty tasks on my task list each day, in my Franklin Planner I had less then eight most days and what was there was genuinely important. 

Another area that changed almost immediately was I started to think again. 

Earlier last year, I had started planning out my projects, YouTube videos and weekly plans in what I called my Planning Book. This was an A4 ring-bound notebook that contained all my plans and initial thoughts about a project or video. 

Suddenly, I found I was thinking things through better. When I sat down to plan out something, I was completely engaged. There were no pop-up notifications, or other digital distractions that would stop my thoughts. I could go deep, much deeper than I ever did digitally. 

And the results were almost instant. My YouTube video views went from an average of 3 to 4 thousand in a week to over 10,000! 

The only change I had made was to plan out my videos on paper instead of an Evernote note. 

On analysis, what I noticed was I became a better storyteller—and important part of creating YouTube videos. And that resulted in almost three times more views on YouTube. 

I quickly began to see that there was something going on here. 

Digital tools are great. They are so convenient, and it’s fantastic that you can carry around fifteen years of notes on a simple device like your phone. But, is that really helpful. 

99% of my journeys and trips never required me to have to look up some important information. 

And on those rare occasions when I did need to look up something, I could have easily explained to the person I was meeting that I would send the information when I got back to my office. 

In fact, remembering to do that after writing it down on a piece of paper may have impressed the person I was meeting and would have given me time to think of a memorable way to convey the information. 

Returning to the Franklin Planner and bringing some paper-based planning back into my life has been a revelation. It’s slowed me down, while at the same time has helped me to become far more productive. 

It’s done that by getting me to think again. 

And that’s perhaps where digital tools are failing us. 

Technology is all about speeding things up and making things more convenient. 

Think about it, the introduction of elevators and escalators has coincided with people becoming less fit and healthy. The convenience of delivery food has created a generation of people who wake up, sit down at a desk all day, then order food and continue to sit while they eat highly processed foods that are slowly killing them. 

Walking up stairs and cooking your own food ensures you are moving and likely eating a lot healthier. It also means you more likely to eat with your family and as a consequence maintain that all important communication with the people you love. 

Technology has massively increased the speed at which things can be done. And in some areas that’s helpful. But, and this is a big but, your brains ability to process all that information has not speeded up. 

This means, if you want to feel fulfilled and be more productive, you should become better at filtering out the noise and focus on the things that are genuinely important. 

Digital tools make that difficult with their emphasis on speed and monotonous lists. 

Paper-based tools enable your brain to slow down, work at a healthy pace and to think deeper. A consequence of which means you think better, make better decisions about what to work on and feel less stressed and overwhelmed. 

Will I go back to an all-digital system? No. 

I’ve found a happy balance. My Franklin Planner allows me to make better choices about what I should work on today. My Planning Book gives me a space to think about what I am trying to do and to brainstorm better ways of doing the work. 

However, I do see a space for digital tools. 

I always scan in my plans to a digital project note. The output of my work is digital. Blog-posts, YouTube videos, online courses and even my coaching programmes are all done digitally. (I use Zoom to talk with my clients who are based all over the world) 

I also use Todoist to keep track of the recurring stuff I would likely forget to do. Reminders to water the office plant (every four days), to do my expenses, respond to my actionable emails and to send out regularly recurring invoices are all managed in Todoist. 

The conclusion I have come to from this experiment is that the perfect system is a hybrid of digital and analogue tools. Your calendar works best digitally, yet on a daily basis, slowing down and writing out what you will do that day works better in an analogue form. It stops you from overwhelming yourself. 

Thank you, Phil, for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.