Day-Timers manufactures and sells personal planners and organizers; the kind that indicate by width and bulk how busy, organized, or just into leather you, your boss, your business prospect, or your competitor are. The Day-Timer is an object of veneration and status, like many other workaday icons: the door nameplate, the exquisitely tailored suit, and the corner office. What distinguishes the Day-Timer, however, from some of these other status symbolsas well as from its innumerable competitors-is its almost mercurial malleability; its seemingly infinite capacity to be customized to an individual user's time management and design needs. During the last ten years, the core of the Day-Timers system has changed from its relatively standard dated and time-segmented calendar sheets to what, since 1985, the company has termed the Work Organizer, a corpus of modular add-in pages that order one's life, not by date, but by topic or project. The company sells preprinted and hole-punched customized sheets; including pages designed to take notes down from self-improvement audiotapes, keep track of frequent flier miles, record the names of spouses and children, and even note the hobbies of current sales prospects. One can also buy a three-copy, carbonless One-Minute Memo in a pad; sized and hole-punched to fit an existing Day-Timer; and need only check a box to indicate to a subordinate that one's aim in writing is, for example, to give him or her a one-minute, in-triplicate praising. With this self-reflexive product, one can, of course, focus on practices with respect to time, itself; and track, on customized sheets, the intrusion of Unscheduled Events; with starting, stopping, and total elapsed (or wasted) time. There are time expenditure analysis forms that feature columns in which one can mark the time one would ideally spend on a given activity, and then track the time he or she is actually spending on it over weeks 1, 2, and 3. If the unseemly metaphor can be forgiven, the Day-Timer is every anal person's wildest fantasy become paper product; a kind of Charmin for the Type-A brain. The company banks on its customers' enthusiasm for having the Day-Timer their way and, in fact, the manufacturer's own employees model enthusiasm for the product they sell in much of own behavior. The company's Customer Service employees are required to use a Day-Timer, in a format of own choosing; and it doesn't appear to be a hardship on them. During my visits to This article owes much to the generous cooperation of Day-Timers staff, particularly Gwen Jones. Thanks also to the members of the American Anthropological Association, who heard and commented upon an earlier draft of these ideas presented at the annual conference in Atlanta in 1994. Unless otherwise noted, materials cited here are in the Day-Timers collection, Allentown, Pennsylvania.
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May 26, 2013
Peter Ager Hafez + 1
Open Access