All About Planners

Benjamin Franklin and electricity meet again.

It is known by many different names: planner, day planner or daily planner, datebook organizer, or even proprietary names such as Day-Timer or Franklin Planner. Whatever you call them, planners are essential tools for today's fast paced business life. What you may not know is that planners have been used by many forward thinking individuals in the past. The Franklin planner, for example, is named after that constant innovator Benjamin Franklin, who kept a small private book. Read on then for a short account of the modern day planner.

Day-timers

Day-Timers, Inc., began its corporate life in 1947. The idea for the daytimer came from Morris Perkin, a lawyer who devised a daily organizer for keeping records, recording tasks, and scheduling activities. Perkin's concept would grow to include other professions, and was well suited to businesspeople who found standard calendars too simplistic for maintaining appointments and contacts.

Day planners achieved widespread recognition thanks to the lifestyle and time management seminars that become paramount during the 1970s and 80s. Today, the Day-Timer company sells its products online and through retail stores, and also sells software packages for personal computers and handheld organizers.

The typical day-planner design features a loose-leaf or wire-bound cover that contains refillable calendar or planner pages. Day-timer page layouts include 1 page per day, 2 pages per day, 2 pages per week, and 2 pages per month, providing users with both detailed and overview time perspectives.

Franklin planner

The Franklin Planner is sold by the Franklin Covey Company, and is regarded by many as the best paper-based date-book organizer. Though the planner is named after Benjamin Franklin, the company is also named for Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the bestselling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

The Franklin Planner is a ring binder that that holds loose-leaf pages and specially designed accessories and inserts. Features include:

prioritized task lists

diary pages

address book

ledger sheets

exerciselogs

The Franklin Planner is also available for Microsoft Outlook, Windows XP, and handheld devices.

Handheld electronic planners

Of course, there are those who find paper planners too cumbersome or old-fashioned. For these, the PDA, or personal digital assistant, is the best planner to have. But such is the pace of modern life that even traditional PDAs aren't as popular as they once were. Convergence is king, and electronic planners that combine the functions of PDAs and cell phones are the all-in-one electronic planners popular today.

Smartphones is the name of these electronic planners, and it's hard to argue with their advantages. Having access to email, phone, planning, and software functions means you have a planner that's also a portable office.

However, standard PDAs and electronic planners continue to enjoy commercial success. Smartphones are still bulkier than newer cell phones, yet their screens are not as large as those on standard PDAs.

With technology changing so rapidly, there remains a lasting appeal to paper-based day planners. After all, neither paper nor books appear to be in any danger of going out of style.

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