The Quiet Strength of Keeping a Planner

The Quiet Strength of Keeping a Planner

Besides making calendars at the end of the year, there's another annual ritual I enjoy: ordering a planner. Every year, I enjoy choosing a new design and color scheme. I also wonder what my planner will be filled with next year. I especially love the smaller 6.3 x 8.4-inch planners because they're always visible on my desk. I chose a beautiful turquoise planner for next year.

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I have been keeping planners ever since a certain point in my life in Germany, and by now I have accumulated quite a few of them. In these planners I record my daily schedule, special events, anniversaries, budgets, and household expenses. I also jot down short reflections, resolutions, words of encouragement, and little prayers. In a way, they have become my daily journals—because I never had the time to write a proper diary, my budget notes ended up taking that role.
My father also kept meticulous household ledgers, and growing up watching him, I think I naturally came to love documenting my life in a similar way. These records have been incredibly helpful for me. Of course, using digital planners or online budgeting apps works too, but I still prefer the analog method. Each year, when I turn the pages of my planner one by one, I can feel the memories and emotions of that time returning to me, and I am grateful for that.

​I am grateful, above all, that I am someone who can write like this. As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, many predict that writers and writing itself will disappear as a profession. But people overlook something important: they see the world through the pressure of having to write well. Must we write beautifully or brilliantly in order to exist? Must writing be extraordinary?
Writing is breath. It is prayer. It is life. It is like air. It does not need to be polished, dazzling, or used to gain glory or recognition. It simply exists—just as I write in my planners because that is how I live.
The thing I regret most, especially as I face the reality of my mother’s limited time, is that my parents did not leave behind their own writings. If they had left records, if they had kept them and preserved them, how precious it would be for me at this moment. Of course, the planners I have collected may one day disappear as well, and so may my words. But I believe that the moment we write, we are alive, and through writing, we leave traces of that life. The same is true for art.
This is why the ability to write is a blessing. Because writing itself is a blessing, an act that affirms life, it is something that cannot be fully overtaken by artificial intelligence. Can AI ever experience the way my planners hold memories? Can it live each day with a different background, new emotions, shifting reflections, and unique resolve—and leave behind a record shaped by those experiences? How deeply can writing move, change, and strengthen a human heart? Can AI ever match the impact of a human-written sentence?
In that sense, the planner I chose this year feels even more meaningful. Although it is just a planner, the small notes scattered throughout show the worries, pains, wounds, and joys of those moments. And for that, I am grateful. We call this experience.

​And I am grateful that I can preserve each moment’s experiences and emotions through writing and drawing. To leave traces of a life in words and images is a quiet but profound gift—one that reminds me that as long as we can create, we remain fully alive.