Academic Diaries: The Student Planner

When I was younger, one privilege I got to enjoy was the ‘back-to-school’ shop. As the years went on and I became more responsible for my choices of study, I became fascinated by the range of options open to me in terms of stationery and filing: would I use plastic wallets this year? Which colour folder would I use for each subject? (Green for History; white for English; blue for French; red for Chemistry.) Narrow- or wide-ruled paper? Black or blue pen? Single- or double-underlining as standard? These were all choices that I was fortunate enough to have the ability to make, but even if my options had been far more restricted, I believe that my interest in the physical objects of study – pens, notepads, erasers – would have remained. I do, after all, care about this topic enough to own a book called Adventures in Stationery.

Those back-to-school shops with parents are now far in the past, replaced by panicked dashes to Rymans or Decitre (depending on the country) whenever I run out of something. Times have changed too, as synched laptops and smartphones have made it easier than ever to plan your time efficiently, and apps have been born with the specific goal of saving you from writing down the same event at the same time every week.

Even today, though – and perhaps surprisingly for someone who types all his essays and has designed his own desktop icons – I haven’t gone completely over to the digital dark side. There’s one area where I’m still resolutely Luddite: the academic diary, or to be more specific, the academic planner.

When I first got a planner of my very own in the halcyon days of 2003, at the start of Year 7, I developed something of an irrational attachment to it, as the extent of damage to it at the end of the year would go on to prove. At that point, the idea of commiting my classes and homework assignments to the digital æther hadn’t even crossed my mind: my Nokia 3410 didn’t have any sort of calendar, and the concept of ‘online scheduling’ was reserved for high-powered executives whose briefcases were being replaced by Blackberries. Even as the Internet expanded beyond the walled garden of AOL and the concepts of first broadband, then wifi encroached into our lives, my friends and I remained devotees of the school’s homework diary. Things only really began to change as the iPhone came along and people around me increasingly started to use words like ‘app’ and ‘calendar event’ without sounding like they were from some alternate universe; even as the homework assignments went digital, my method of recording them remained firmly pen-and-paper-based.

Things only really started to change when university rolled around. Once it became my job to manage my own time, I began to find myself getting very interested in maintaining an immaculate diary. This didn’t necessarily mean that I wrote everything in it in time, nor did it stop me from occasionally forgetting meetings, but it did mean that, every Friday morning after lectures, I would ensconce myself into the corner of the MML Faculty’s café and note down – colour-coded – events that I hadn’t yet transferred to The Planner. These events didn’t necessarily have to be coming up: I would often find myself filling in rowing outings from weeks earlier, just to make sure that I’d recorded it. The colour-coding occasionally created its own problems, and required creative solutions to overcome them, whether it was double-shading a single box or creating a new highlighting system entirely, but looking back at it now I’m very glad that I took the time to do it.

By now, I suspect it’s become clear to you – as it did to me – that I wasn’t writing for any real practical purpose. At best, knowing what was coming up that week was a pleasant bonus. Rather, I liked knowing what I had done, where I had been, and how I had spent any given day. In that sense, the phrase ‘academic diary’ is perhaps more true than I realised. When I was younger, I did actually keep a diary, but having fallen out of the habit, I found myself missing the little snippets of information; the nuggets that remind me of what I was doing at a given point in time. That cluster of rowing outings in April reminding me of frantic preparation for Bumps with Clare M3; the revision sessions with my friend Dominic in the University Library … I’ll always be able to find out the when and where of them, and that is something that I find really valuable.

So planners will last, but they are also – in their own way – ephemeral. Whereas a Google calendar will continue infinitely into the distance with every click of the ‘next month’ button, my Palgrave student planner stops at the end of August, calling out for me to buy a new planner; to begin anew. And perhaps this strict division of time into neat year-long chunks, reinforced by the structures and rituals that fill Les Black’s slim volume, comes full circle to impose itself on my digital ‘self’. Every September since 2010, a new planner has been accompanied by a new set of essay formatting guidelines, as the enforced renewal inspired by the fresh pages of a new academic diary seeps its way not only into where I record my ideas, but how I present them. Proof, if ever I needed it, that the physical academic diary, as the embodiment of each new year and the key to each one past, really does matter; or, perhaps, simply proof that I need to stop writing blog posts while getting ideas above my station.