How Your Franklin Planner is Killing Your Relationships

The Franklin Planner.  I've used one and maybe you have, too.  Although the Franklin Planner may help you organize your life, it may be slowly killing you and those around you.  I want to tell you about it before it's too late.

If you already know how a Franklin Planner works, you can skip ahead a few paragraphs if you want.  If you don't already know, then read on.  The next few paragraphs will help you put this terrible force you're dealing with into perspective.

Most of us make lists of things we need to do.  You might not make them all the time, but at some point in your life you've probably had a bunch of stuff you needed to get done and you wrote them down on a scrap of paper, a legal pad, or maybe even the palm of your hand just to make sure you didn't forget anything.  It was your "to-do list."  Really not a big deal, right?  To start to understand the Franklin Planner, think of it as a to-do list on steroids.

For each day of the year, the Franklin Planner has two facing pages.  The left side has a bunch of lines where you write your to-do list.  To the left of each item there are two more spaces, one for the priority of your task and the other for it's status.  The page on the right side is your schedule for the day broken into 15 minute sections.  The idea is to completely map out your whole day, both how you're going to spend every second and what you are going to accomplish during your waking hours.

This may seem to be pretty innocuous, but when you dig into it a little more, you will see a different picture.  You are supposed to start your day with something called "Planning and Solitude."  This is the number one item on your list every day and it also occupies the first 30 minutes of your day.  The idea here is to spend 30 minutes making your to-do list and prioritizing all your tasks.  Think about it.  The first item on your to-do list is to make your to-do list.  Your day is about to get completely out of hand and you haven't even been out of bed for an hour yet.

A couple of paragraphs ago I mentioned the spaces for priority and status.  During your Planning and Solitude time, one of the things you're supposed to be doing is prioritizing your list.  To prioritize, you put and A, B, or C next to each item.  Of course, you may have more than one of each priority of items, so you put a number after the letter to indicate the priority within the priority.  I suppose you could probably add another letter or number if you like so you'd have a priority within a priority within a priority.  You leave the status field blank until you actually start working on the task.  At that point you put a dot in the field and then change the dot to a check mark whe the task is completed.  If you need to move the task to the next day, you put a right-facing arrow in the field and then copy the task to the next day.  You are only allowed to do this once for B and C tasks, but not at all for A tasks.  A tasks have to be completed that day no matter what.  You can also delegate the task to someone else.  I can't remember the mark you use to indicate that the task was delegated.

Now, when you think about it you might think this sounds like a pretty good system of keeping things organized.  And you'd be right because it is.  The Franklin Planner is a great system for organizing your tasks so you don't have to remember every little task you need to get done. The problem is what comes with your planner.

People are often introduced to the Franklin Planner through a training course offered in their workplace.  The Franklin Planner courses teach users that there is nothing more important than organization and that not completing at least your A tasks is unacceptable.  They don't come right out and say it, but you are a failure if you're pages aren't completely filled with tasks and scheduled events and you are not able to successfully put check marks next to each item before the end of your day.  Nothing less is acceptable.  No exceptions.  Your are taught to judge the success or failure of your day by the number of tasks you complete and how much of the day's calendar was filled.  Congratulations, your new Franklin Planner comes with a free membership in a cult.

You might say that buying into this whole thing is an individual choice, but unfortunately it doesn't always stop there.  Remember the status field next to each item? One of the things you are allowed to put in there is a mark that says you have delegated the task to someone else.  That's fine if you're at work and you manage a group of people, but when your task list starts to fill with tasks that belong in your non-work life, then the line between work life and personal life begins to blur.  And when you start delegating personal tasks to family members, friends, and others you have a big problem.  When your planner isn't large enough to hold all the tasks and scheduled events you identified during your Planning and Solitude so you go buy a larger one, you are obsessed, not productive.  When you start assigning tasks to your family, then you have a huge problem that isn't going to go away by itself.

When the people you live with work just as hard as you all week and look forward to some down time on the weekend, the last thing they want to see when they get up on Saturday morning is a two page list of things for them to do by the end of the day.  They will resent the fact that you think it is your responsibility to plan their day for them.  It isn't.  Their time is theirs, not yours.

So, if you use a Franklin Planner or something similar, do a little extra thinking tomorrow morning during your Planning and Solitude and decide if your planner is hurting you or your loved ones.  Get things back in balance before it's too late.