This week, I learned in a WIRED feature about the worldwide community of planners — people, mostly women, united by their love of organizing their lives with paper, pens and stickers.

This article caught my attention because of my own obsessive, complicated relationship with paper (I love it in all forms; it’s heavy; it follows me around, much of it bearing difficult messages from the past) and because it appears in WIRED. A tech magazine?

Hey, paper is a technology. And planning is more than the paper:

“These women gain a sense of control in a chaotic world by planning as much of their lives as they can,” Quinci LeGardye writes.

I feel it, the need to control by making a list. I do it, too, but I have my own method. On a single sheet of paper, folded twice to form 4 rectangles, I write my work day to-do lists. I also have a little red paper planner for 2020, the same pocket sized planner I’ve ordered from the New York Review of Books for the past three years.

Interestingly, I don’t use it much anymore. My most recent entry was on October 7, noting that I’d submitted a short story to a journal. And coming up: Oh, on Sunday, Oct. 18, “Marathon.” That’s today…