It was 100 years ago that Swedish artist Carl Larsson published his classic
paean to domestic life, “A Home.” Loving watercolor depictions of his
family abode were accompanied by wistful musings, such as the one about his “Cozy
Corner,” where he “experienced that unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion
from the noise of the world.”
Today, “Home sweet home” seems like an antiquated notion. The nuclear family is no more.
One-quarter of all Americans currently live alone, and a third of the couples living
together are doing so without children. As for seclusion? From radios on up to
satellite dishes and Web TV, the stream of media into (and out of) the home has grown constant.
Meanwhile, borders between work and home are shifting, if not disappearing altogether.
“The Un-Private House,” a new exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art,
showcases 26 homes that take these changes to heart. Dispensing with
cherished ideals and traditions of homemaking, they attempt to update Le Corbusier’s idea of
the home as a “machine for living.” A house for a Minneapolis bachelor is a
radical reworking of a suburban residence, tucked behind an unchanged ’50s
facade. Sprawling over an English hillside, an imposing six-bedroom home
has thatch on the walls instead of the roof — and an entire, separate
dwelling for the children. A loft for two Wall Street traders features digital screens,
strategically placed across from the kitchen and living room, so the owners can keep constant
tabs on the market.
Indeed, many aspects of these un-private homes are unsettling: One home has the garage located
on the roof, with a sloping walkway sliced into it that leads down to the front door.
(So when it rains, do you welcome a big puddle of runoff into the house upon opening the door?)
Another has a round, floor-to-ceiling door/window in a child’s bedroom,
akin to a vault door, but hinged on its axis. It seems like a nifty idea,
until you realize it opens out into thin air, with a drop down two stories.
If some of the home designs seem off-putting or downright alienating, the design of “The Un-Private House” is a mix of comfortable domestic references and high-tech accouterments. Large-scale digital images of the homes serve as wallpaper in the exhibit, while sturdy beds and tables act as pedestals for architectural models. Virtual home tours play on the latest flat-screen TVs. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a living room-like reading area with irresistibly
cushy seating and a small library of architectural titles; but the show’s pride and joy is a large round table where people sit down together to feast on digital information. At
the center, a Lazy Susan holds 26 coaster-sized disks, one for each house: Set one on a “placemat” at the table, and an interactive guide to the house
appears on the Corian surface, projected from above. If visitors revert to
their couch-potato selves in the exhibit’s living room, here at the dining
table they’re like eager kids reveling in a deluxe Lego set.
I sat down with the curator of “The Un-Private House,” Terence Riley, to
talk about people’s fierce attachment to domestic ideals, the secret of
Martha Stewart’s success and how the blurred lines between private and public extend beyond the home.
You framed “The Un-Private House” around the idea that home life has
changed more in the past 30 to 50 years than in the previous, say, 400
years. But in the larger picture, most homes have changed so little.
Are we really thinking all that differently in terms of our domestic lives?
The biggest change I see that is really going to drive domestic
architecture, as well as society, is the notion that the man gets up in the
morning and leaves the house, goes out in the world and lives out this role
as a public person — leaving the women and children in the home as a kind
of cocoon. This is such a fundamental part of traditional middle-class
culture. But virtually all those things have changed. For instance, it’s
entirely likely that a household these days has no kids, whereas some
people have argued that the ultimate goal of the bourgeois was to raise
children to inherit your property — a kind of capitalistic means of overcoming death.
Some segments of society are addressing these changes, but it seems
there’s another segment that is actually retrenching on the domestic
scene. Everybody supposedly needs these SUVs, for instance, which are bigger than any ’50s station wagon. They’re driving them into
gated communities and parking them at the mini-mansion. How does all this
relate to your vision of the un-private house?
Gated communities are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. housing market. They’re fantasies — self-delusions, really — being played out on a
mass scale, with massive amounts of dollars. But does a gated community really reinforce this notion of the private house? These mini-mansion guys
aren’t secluded from the world. They’ve got their Bloomberg computers to watch their stocks, their satellite dishes, cell phones, security systems.
It’s not so much keeping anything in or out, as keeping everything.
The mini-mansion may look traditional, but inside are televisions with cabinets
that open and close automatically. These houses are wired to the max, and yet their owners are more comfortable with the imagery of pre-technological
revolution houses. [Urban historian] Witold Rybczynski and other people who don’t really care
for modernist imagery, they’ll say: What’s wrong with hiding technology? Plumbing gets hidden in the walls — even modernists didn’t insist on
putting the pipes out!
There’s another argument that stems from new
urbanism, that we need front porches and peaked roofs and obvious entries
to homes — these forms are hard-wired into our psyche as symbols of home,
they help stabilize us in an unstable world. I’ve even read that traditional, vertically oriented windows are better than horizontal picture
windows because they echo a standing, active human body — as opposed to a
lying-down, presumably depressed or even dead person.
Well, I don’t think anybody’s DNA has a peaked roof in it. I’d say that’s an acquired association. There are plenty of examples in Europe and
elsewhere where the principles of the new urbanism are played out just
fine, they’re in practice in many places in the world. But adding a sort of
stylistic mandate to them just seems kind of crazy.
The point is that good urbanism comes in different scales, different styles, and it also comes from having unexpected or new things. It’s not
just this canned, closed set of references. The Dutch row houses in the show
are individualized statements about the people who live there, what they do
and what they need, but they’re also building blocks designed to be
modified and put elsewhere. They fit into the city’s fabric, even though
they’re not traditional. The new urbanists have it right, that pieces should
fit together and make something — it’s the presumed aesthetic program and a
lot of the values that thereby get grafted onto new urbanism that I have a
problem with. In Europe, you can see how they’ve dealt with a lot of those
urban issues that making living in the cities great. It doesn’t have to
mean picket fences, or front porches done in ye olde lemonade stand-style.
Porches can be whatever they want to be.
The idea of being technologically wired runs through a lot of the houses in this exhibit.
The architects Hariri & Hariri mention how in their Digital House,
empty spaces are “no longer a waste of time” — having digital screens as
walls creates “opportunities for heightened awareness.” What’s with this
ideal of 100 percent total engagement? Is there no longer a value in doing
nothing, or having emptiness, or just plain relaxing?
Don’t just do something. Sit there! [Laughs.] Well, people are going to
have to learn how to manipulate technology to their own benefit. Every new
technology offers promise — and behind every promise there’s a risk, just
as behind every risk there’s a promise, as the saying goes. I’m willing to
believe that there’s a more dignified way of living, and that technology is
probably the answer, but you probably have to learn how to live with it.
Take the loft in the exhibit that belongs to the couple who are traders on
Wall Street — they actually trade out of their home, around the world, so
they might be working with foreign markets at 3 a.m.
When I would describe their lives, people would groan. They
think this couple must be freaks, or automatons, or incredible economic
animals. But the fact is, they’re a good example of learning how to live
with this stuff. They don’t have a bunch of computers sitting around their
bedroom; they’ve made a space for them, and you can see that space from a
couple other places, but you can also close it off. You can do whatever
people have done ever since radios, telephones, televisions were introduced
to the house: Find some way of controlling them so they don’t run your life.
But I think there’s long been a popular fear, especially in the last 10 years,
that technology is like this tsunami that’s coming and is going to sweep
over us and subjugate everybody.
Some people are concerned about being overwhelmed by technology, but at
the same time, I don’t think there’s been another time in the 20th century
when technology has had such a high degree of respect or popularity. After
the world wars, there were these periods where technology was really seen
as this evil force.
Also during the arts and crafts movement at the turn of the century,
which was a reaction to all the new technology at that time.
That was a generation of people who were feeling the first shocks of
the industrial age. And if I think our superhighways are ugly, the initial
manifestations of the industrial age were indeed crude, loud, dirty — the
reason why we have zoning to keep factories away from residences. There was
a huge disparity between contemporary life and another life that people
knew so well, but was out of reach: the wife at home cooking meals, things
being made as they had been for centuries, furniture hand-carved by
specially trained people — this whole notion of reality that was severely
challenged by the Industrial Revolution. There was a crisis of authenticity
when things started getting manufactured out of new materials, with
stamping, casting, printing. It’s hard for us to imagine how much it threw
that culture into a tizzy.
You could say we’re having a similar crisis of authenticity today. People
choose electronic “wallpaper” for their “desktops.” And then in
so-called real life, you have enterprises like [furniture store] Restoration Hardware that
capitalize on the crisis, building stories around mission lamps and old
metal juicers. They hark back to a time that people today probably never
knew themselves.
That’s what Martha Stewart’s all about, too. When she works with these
very romantic, sentimental notions about domestic life, people know she’s
not referring to their parents’ world — it’s clearly about how their
grandparents lived, or going even further back. It’s also about making
things. Her deal works so well because making things has become very exotic
in a Western industrialized world that is now basically all consumers.
Nobody makes anything — they don’t make food, bread, fabrics.
So she embodies a more literal arts and crafts ideal for our turn of
the century?
Well, the original arts and crafts people were trying to reinstitute a
world that was still within memory. With Martha Stewart it’s different –
she can show people how to bake bread, or make nails for that matter — her
magazine reminds us that at one time people actually did make these things
for themselves.
What was once necessity has become an exotic form of leisure.
It is. It’s like these people with gym bodies. They don’t have muscles
from hard work; they have muscles from having time off. And baking bread
now is not about work, it’s about leisure.
The BV house in England, where the children have their own separate house, reminded me again of mainstream mini-mansions, where the parents have a “master suite” set apart from the kids’ areas. I wonder if another psychological shift is
occurring where people are becoming less sentimental about children, or the
ideals of childhood in general.
There are two houses in the show like that. At first these places seem
crazy, you think what are these people doing? Do they not like their kids?
It’s especially touchy in the wake of the Littleton high school
shootings. People were horrified that these parents had no idea of what
their kids were up to. What were they doing — or not doing — to their kids?
The houses in the show do tend to have more public spaces. When the kids aren’t in their rooms — which, unlike [in] the mini-mansion, aren’t really these huge suites, just more functional sleeping rooms — they’re in these big, open social spaces. So there is a
kind of balance there. But there’s another way of looking at that
sentimentality issue. My own mother became a mommy 10 months after she
became a Mrs., but a lot of couples these days are having kids later in
life. They may have lived for 10 years as a couple with a romantic life, a
private life together. And I think when they have kids, there’s a
hesitation to completely give up this notion of themselves as a couple.
This doesn’t come at the expense of the devotion to children — when this
kind of couple decides to have kids, it tends to be a very conscious
decision. They’re serious about being parents, but they also realize that
people are capable of some separation as well: a little bit of autonomy, a
little bit of privacy.
That ideal is worked into the design of their houses, and also in more
mainstream houses, to a less obvious extreme. Maybe because people still
seem wary of it.
It’s this thing about institutionalizing it that gets people antsy.
People think in the back of their minds, even though they could never bring
themselves to say it, that women should stay home. Families with two
parents working are dealing with things as best they can, and hopefully not
producing more Trench Coat Mafia kids, but people fear there’s something
wrong with this way of living — even if they themselves are doing it. It
isn’t “right” enough to be enshrined in the house.
It shows how the house can be an emotional battlefield, not just for its
residents, but people on the outside. Wasn’t there a backlash against Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe’s glass house — both the house and the woman who lived there?
They were suspicious of the house itself, and the fact that its owner
was a single woman in her 40s — and a doctor. Obviously, Mrs. Farnsworth
would hardly be a freak today, and the Farnsworth House would probably go
down as one of the more elegantly conservative homes.
And yet she eventually decided she didn’t like living there, which
brings up the issue of physical transparency in these un-private houses.
Take the glass house in Houston, and the pair of row houses in Amsterdam —
or the most dramatic case, the house in Tokyo that has a giant, two-story curtain
running along two of its facades. These are all in urban neighborhoods. Since you’ve
visited these houses and the people living in them, how do they actually get along there?
Two things. Almost every glass house I’ve seen has curtains. It isn’t
that there’s no privacy, it’s an operable kind of privacy — you modulate it
depending on what’s happening in the house. Plus, the Farnsworth house is
completely out of view of other houses. In a more dense atmosphere, like in
Houston, Amsterdam or Tokyo, it’s more of an issue. But it’s not just you
in the house — it’s the public.
And if you’re prone to walking around naked in your glass house with
the curtain open — are you making other people uncomfortable, or angry at
you for encroaching on their sense of modesty? It’s a two-way thing that
society negotiates. The curtain-wall house in Tokyo is actually a surprise,
because the tendency there is to be more reserved, whereas in Amsterdam
they have prostitutes in shop windows and sex is a commonplace dinner topic.
I saw how much people — myself included — were enjoying themselves in the living-room area of the exhibit, plopped down on these sofas like they were their own. Starbucks had to start competing with the cozier independent shops by putting comfy chairs and reading areas in their stores. And you see movie theaters putting in love seats … maybe
this is a kind of more physical transparency for people who don’t live in
an architect-designed un-private house — they’re gravitating toward being
more at home in public.
I think they definitely are. In Paris at the turn of the 20th century,
there was a cafe for every 67 people. Parisians had this very
developed notion of the neighborhood as a public living room. And Americans
are starting to feel more comfortable with that, even though we’re normally
thought of as generally very reserved, private people.
The design for the bachelor pad in the suburbs is striking because it
touches on this whole other architectural wave: retrofitting a suburban
house for other needs than raising a family. For one or two people, a house
like that could be a small palace — and with all these demographic changes,
it seems likely that we could end up with a huge glut of suburban family
homes on the market.
I think that’s happening now, actually. People have already transformed
the way they live. The question is now, do they want to make a decision about
the way their house looks that reflects that, or not? For probably one of
the first times ever, “resale” — the idea that you never want to do
anything out of the ordinary with your house, because then it won’t sell –
is not so much an issue. When so many households are couples without
children, and 25 percent of people are living alone, quite frankly, resale
doesn’t mean as much. There are a lot of people out there who may very
well want what you have.
This is the time of year I go half-crazy — not from the heat, but from the cold. And it’s not because summer came late to New York. In June, as outside temperatures barely nosed over 70, my office (at a swank, almost spanking-new tower in midtown Manhattan) was chilled to a degree that seemed appropriate for a Chardonnay or a shrimp cocktail — or a morgue, for that matter — but not a workplace full of living bodies.
And I’m not the only one rubbing my hands together to keep warm. One co-worker says she can’t concentrate on her job: The numbness in her body is spreading to her mind, she claims. Another dreams of throwing an ergonomic chair through one of the sealed, 18th-floor windows, just to get a bit of sun-kissed air. I’m a lucky part-timer, who, by Wednesday, is anticipating the toastiness of my apartment with all the glee of a 5-year-old who hears the ice-cream man coming. It’s summertime, after all — aren’t you supposed to be hot?
Apparently not. Air conditioning is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant inventions of the 20th century; many glibly celebrate it as a marvelous machine that keeps us from sweating. This is significant, given Americans’ phobia about such bodily functions, though I think there’s something bigger at stake. Those millions of window units and central-air systems are so taken for granted, we can’t see air conditioning for what it truly is: a subversive force that has robbed us of summer.
Only a pop song would claim that just because it’s summertime, the livin’ is easy. It probably never was — but at least it’s different. Air conditioning resists this fact with unsubtle, often overdone blasts of cold air, negating the very essence of the season, eliminating the need for those activities and rituals that surround cooling off.
To me, this is the most palpably appalling thing about it. Some would have you believe that life in the southern U.S. is not possible without AC (never mind all those even closer to the equator who make do without it). But generations of pre-AC Southerners developed an entire, quite civilized culture around keeping their cool — even the architecture was designed to catch every stray breeze. And a single breeze should be a big deal in what ought to be a lazy, languid, sensual season. There should be continuous glasses of iced tea, and giddy gratitude for thunderstorms after a heat wave, and spontaneous soakings by any means possible (sprinklers, fire hydrants, kiddie pools and so on).
Cooling down also includes the pleasure of walking from 90 degrees into a frosty grocery store or movie theater, which I enjoy as much as anybody — at first. But then the novelty wears off, the chill sets in and the goose bumps pop up. That is, unless one remembers to carry a sweater everywhere, which is really fun when it’s 90 degrees. Moreover, a routine series of icebox-to-oven transitions throughout the day is rather grating — both environments become equally irritating. A whimsical friend speculates that if all the air conditioners in New York were simply redirected outside, it’s possible we wouldn’t need them inside.
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Alas, large-scale climate control is still only for comic-book villains. We just zealously direct those energies inward: According to the Air-conditioning and Refrigeration Institute (ARI), AC is a $20-billion-dollar-a-year industry; and TU Electric, a utility serving about a third of Texas, says 96 percent of its customers have AC — for 85 percent, it’s central air. Even in the Midwest, air conditioning has achieved an 85 percent saturation rate, with 55 percent of it central air.
Certainly, air conditioning is crucial for some things. For instance, computer chips and pharmaceuticals, those linchpins of contemporary society, can’t be produced without it. But do these loud, energy-hogging, atmosphere-warming machines need to be so ubiquitous, and so overused? In a country where “more” and “better” are synonymous, it seems the answer is yes. It makes one wonder if AC is addictive: Once a person is accustomed to a particular level of cool, anything else seems positively oppressive (in my apartment building, one window unit was roaring away on nights when the temperature dipped to 50). Even at its best — that is, when used judiciously, to create a temperate environment — AC is the great neutralizer, creating the same dull interior climate, 365 days a year.
Thus, clothing gets neutralized, too. “Air-conditioning has made it so that people no longer dress for the season — they dress for the occasion,” observes Gail Cooper, a historian who recently published “Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960.” In the workplace, this means suits year round, for those whose jobs require them — and it’s a common assumption that the heavier attire of higher-ups determines the office climate, leaving secretaries and others to do a reverse Mr. Rodgers and don cardigans when they get to work. Far be it for the Suits to doff their woolen armor, roll up their shirt-sleeves as in days of yore and actually look like they’re working.
Yet even if everyone dressed identically, some would still shiver while others sweltered. We have the technology but can’t seem to get it adjusted right: According to Cooper, engineers’ efforts to divine a heat-and-humidity index that represents universal “comfort” have been — surprise — fruitless. AC puts everyone on the same setting. That creates a lack of choice, which, as Cooper discovered, is the single most hated thing about air conditioning. Of course, if I were in charge, I’d please the thin-blooded people and let everyone else complain about the heat. It’s summertime, I’d say. You’re supposed to be hot.
A pipe dream, I know. Because there are other reasons for the over-chill in American offices: For instance, some computer equipment needs extra-cold AC to run properly. Could it be that those who lord it over the thermostats also believe this to be true of their human resources? We are still meat, notwithstanding our increasingly intimate relations with technology, but is there perhaps an unspoken belief that a chilly environment keeps workers on their toes, running at maximum efficiency? After all, David Letterman, a control freak if there ever was one, must have a reason for keeping his TV studio notoriously frigid.
Indeed, if cold equals peppy and perky, heat just breeds sluggishness. Nowadays, only a mega-blizzard can bring a city to its knees — but things used to slow down some in the summer, and occasionally, they’d grind to a halt. Pre-AC office workers were sent home when the heat/humidity index reached a certain point; Washington lore says that governmental bureaucracy only blossomed when federal office buildings got air conditioning. Even in New England, factories shut down in August, giving workers the month for vacation. Europeans still do this — Paris is famously empty in August — but in the United States, only the soigné citizens of the art world adhere to this policy.
In a recent issue of The New Yorker devoted to the supposed summer-reading tradition, Adam Gopnik dared to say what many have been thinking for years: The American summer is fabricated, fanciful and almost totally fake — just like the American Christmas. Indeed, we wistfully base the ideal summer on our memories of having had three months’ freedom from school as children; in the adult world, however, time is money, and two weeks’ vacation is standard — only academics and the wealthy get a real, ideal summer (and even among the latter, the breadwinner often stays home to work).
The rest of us remain dependable drones year round. AC “helps improve our productivity by providing us with a better working environment,” boasts a press release for ARI’s “Air Conditioning Appreciation Days” (July 3 to August 15, in case you care). Ed Dooley, the institute’s VP for communications and education, sounded even more fatuous in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Thanks to air conditioning, you work 12-hour days,” he said. “Isn’t that great?” Yeah — ’cause at least we’re not sweating, Ed!
The primary benefits of AC have insidiously turned out to be related to work, not comfort. By creating a world where we don’t have to alter our lives with the seasons, air conditioning has effectively wiped out our last good excuse for doing nothing: being hot. (And as we all know, nothing is more reprehensible than doing nothing.) In this regard, AC was a forerunner of beepers, cell phones, faxes, laptops — all those inventions that blur the line between making us more productive and simply making us work more.
Cranked up on AC, the capitalist machine can function everywhere at a continuous, uniformly brisk clip, reinforcing the belief that the fate of the free world hinges on endlessly upward-spiraling economic indicators. Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are long gone. Now there’s just the crazy part: the same old workaholic stress, now seasonless, enveloped in climate-controlled “comfort.” Which, for some of us, is crazy-making in itself.
Can you really “have it all” simply by having it all in your planner? That’s what I tried to find out by chucking my battered Filofax and submitting to the rigors of the Franklin Day Planner — “the ultimate lifestyle management tool.”
I was partly motivated by journalistic curiosity about how something so trivial as a day planner inspires such fervent devotion in its users — who get hooked on a “System” that, to everyone else, seems shrouded in cultish mystery. At the same time, I was reluctantly (and furtively) wondering if maybe there was a better way to be organized — something more than confetti showers of Post-Its, or legal pads covered with dense, secret-code-like scribbles.
The Franklin Planner is the best-known product from Franklin Covey Company, formed out of the merger last year between Franklin Quest and the Covey Leadership Center (the latter’s namesake, Stephen Covey, is the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”). Even before the merger, Franklin Quest was a big corporate success story. The company now has 121 retail stores and projects $550 million in revenue for fiscal 1998. It trains 750,000 people each year and estimates that there are a total of 5 million Planner users.
In addition to the Planners, Franklin Covey offers a host of “professional services” and “product solutions”: books, tapes, CD-ROMs and seminars that make up a self-help/training/management-consulting empire along the lines of Anthony “Awaken the Giant Within” Robbins. Franklin Covey claims a long list of Fortune 500 mega-corporations among its clients; indeed, most Franklin fans are introduced to it through their workplaces, where they’re often standard-issue office equipment, along with desks and computers.
Franklinites can rely on low-tech paper notebooks or ramp up as far as they like on the high-tech spectrum, using Ascend software to extend the Franklin method to their PCs, Macs and PalmPilots. But whatever technology you adopt, the Franklin Planner requires some learning before it starts working miracles. “Until you’ve had some instruction on it, you’ll find that the Planner is really nothing more than an oversized date book organizer,” says Franklin Covey CEO Hyrum W. Smith on an audiotape that comes with each Planner. “There is a great deal more to the Franklin Day Planner than just keeping track of appointments,” he promises, in a voice as folksy as his name.
Indeed, if used as intended, the Planner becomes the hub of one’s entire life. Its pages contain all activities, as well as relationships, thoughts, beliefs, dreams, desires and plans for five or six years into the future. More than a mere organizer, it’s close to a religion. In the Franklin Covey faith, organization is a means to salvation.
Hyrum Smith developed the first Planners in 1984, meaning that nobody has yet grown up with one (although, like cigarette companies, they’re working to get kids hooked with specially designed agendas). Therefore, becoming a Franklinite means tossing out dearly held bad habits and exposing oneself to a new “system.” For many, the first step toward that conversion is the strongly recommended eight-hour “TimeQuest” seminar ($199). A couple of months ago, I took the plunge.
I showed up at 8:30 a.m., prompt but bleary-eyed, at a midtown Manhattan hotel — me and a couple dozen other perennially disorganized people, ready to be initiated into the Franklin way by an instructor named Montie Horton. Energetic but not hyper, cheerful without being a cheerleader, her demeanor was carefully calibrated to appeal to and motivate a wide range of personalities. She’s a professional people-knower, the kind who remembers names and professions.
Throughout the day, Horton took us through our TimeQuest workbooks, in which we took notes and inscribed the “Natural Laws” she dictated — the first being that “successful managers of time are willing to do that which unsuccessful people do not do.” In other words, we were already better than the other schlubs who are not willing to go on a TimeQuest.
We learned how to establish Governing Values, from which Long-Range Goals and the Intermediate Steps to achieve them are derived: These all go in the back of the Planner, behind a “Values and Goals” tab. The idea is that they will filter up into the front of the book to shape Prioritized Daily Task Lists and monthly Master Task Lists. Why? Because you look at them each day and plan them into your life.
Toward the end of the seminar, Horton urged us to follow the day’s lessons diligently for 21 days — which, as some of the smarter go-getters knew, is how long it takes to acquire a habit. As we were packing up, she called out gaily, “Make sure that elements that denote success surface regularly in your Planner!” I think this was the Franklinite way of saying “Have fun!”
Like religious converts or recovering addicts, Franklinites are distinguished by their faith, as well as a sense of community. AA members identify themselves by asking, “Are you a friend of Bill W.?” while Franklinites are apt to spot each others’ binders and observe, “Oh — so you do the Franklin Planner?” That verb indicates a crucial difference between those who merely use a day planner and those who do the Franklin Planner. There’s a “saved” aspect to them — an ever-present consciousness of the difference between their bad, pre-Franklin selves and their new, improved selves.
At the seminar, Horton asked whether any of us had rooted around in the trash desperately searching for a scrap of paper we’d assumed was useless. Alcoholics swill mouthwash, junkies turn tricks to pay for a fix — and the disgustingly disorganized paw through their garbage. Most of us had, in fact, degraded ourselves in this way. “Now that’s not very good for your self-esteem, is it?” she chided. And just as AA meetings and a belief in a Higher Power keep recovering alcoholics from falling off the wagon, the Planner itself — as well as, for many Franklinites, “refresher” TimeQuest seminars — are all that stands between them and a life of dissolution and disorganization.
In fact, a lot of Franklin converts do have a crisis or epiphany that leads them to take on immaculate organizational skill. Some, after an intervention of sorts, are made to go to the seminar by their higher-ups. Gabriel Garay, a self-professed Franklin freak, went to the TimeQuest seminar against his will, on his birthday, almost a year ago. “I left there with a really bad headache,” he remembers, but it didn’t take long before he was a model Franklinite. “Before, I would scribble phone numbers on the edge of newspapers. I never returned calls — people would get really mad at me.” Now his Planner includes a “Phone Log” designed to eliminate that problem. “I won’t listen to my answering machine without it,” he says.
Ann Marie Morris has been a Franklinite since 1988, when her boss told her in no uncertain terms, “Get yourself a planner or get yourself a new job.” (At that time, she was an events organizer for Merrill Lynch, and accidentally sent the COO as the guest of honor to a cocktail party intended for the CEO.) Morris became such an avid user that her current employer, Chase Manhattan, paid for her to be a certified TimeQuest instructor for her co-workers. You could say that she’s an in-house evangelist for Franklin Planners.
The parallels between the daily Franklin devotions and more conventional religious practices are certainly not lost on Franklinites. “My friends all think I’m gone for this — they admire it, but they also see it as fanaticism,” says Garay. And Morris admits with a sheepish grin, “It really is kind of like a cult, it’s a little weird.”
Hyrum W. Smith himself, in the introductory tape, role-plays a non-Franklinite: “I’m one of those that’s gonna give you a hard time about carrying this book,” he warns. “They’re gonna say, ‘What’d you do, join a cult? You’re carrying this crazy book!’”
See, one of the ground rules is to have the Planner with you always; another is to spend 10-20 minutes each day with it in “Planning and Solitude.” Members of most any faith engage in prayer and solitude, often as a request for divine guidance, but planning and solitude is simply guiding yourself. Who needs God and the Good Book when you’ve got your Values & Goals and a Franklin Planner?
The design for Smith’s “crazy book” was inspired by Benjamin Franklin and the proverbial little book he carried, in which he reminded himself of his 13 Virtues and wrote of higher pursuits and long-term plans — a practice to which he attributed his protean accomplishments throughout his life. In the TimeQuest seminar, Franklin is covered briefly and superficially, in the manner that Americans seem to like their history: Look at how much he got done! He becomes a one-dimensional mascot for the company — a book-toting prophet of sorts.
Franklin Covey has a more interesting, and perhaps more meaningful, tie to a real-life 19th century prophet: Hyrum W. Smith is a Mormon, his great-great grand-uncle is Joseph P. Smith, founding father of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormons are the creators of a world-famous genealogical archive, and have a general “passion for accurate records,” according to “The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions” — and just what is the sum total of a Franklin Planner life, which amounts to hundreds of pages stored in specially designed binders, one for each year, if not a meticulously detailed chronicle?
One of Hyrum W. Smith’s maxims is a curious mix of touchy-feeliness and executive-style pragmatism: “Inner peace is having serenity, balance and harmony in our lives achieved through the appropriate control of events.” With such a self-starter approach, it’s little surprise that the Franklin Planner, with its standard-issue pages of institutional pastel green, is largely geared toward business people. Throughout the Franklin Covey catalog, sample pages from Planners show countless notes on staff meetings, performance reviews, flow charts, survey results, annual reviews and memos.
Ann Marie Morris told me that the key to the Planner’s success is in “how it creates balance in life by keeping the personal and the professional in one place.” In other words, Franklinites conceive of everything in their lives, work and non-work, within the brisk, businesslike format of the Planner — writing down dreams and desires along with notes from benefits meetings and lunches with project leaders. Franklin Covey has keyed into and capitalized on this fluid relationship between the individual and the corporation, this blurring of lines between the professional and the private. In the seminar, the process of identifying, prioritizing and clarifying your governing values is seen as creating a personal variation on a corporate “mission statement.”
Horton showed us how life can be pictured as a pie chart, just like a budget or a survey, with slices for health, family, career, spiritual, community, education, finances and emotions. To live life, apparently, is to efficiently manage all those slices, just like a profitable and productive business.
The fundamental equation on which the Planner is built, we learned, is that more control equals less stress equals more productivity equals more self-esteem. That end “product,” if you will, taps into a predominant concept in business (and the larger culture) in recent years. Of course, the real bottom line is the third element, individual productivity, which also happens to enhance corporate productivity. The self-esteem bit is just so much gravy — but it sure does makes employers look concerned, which is always a good thing. Moreover, it’s not so surprising that Franklin Planners and other productivity boosters have become so popular in an era of corporate downsizing, in which it’s a matter of course to urge employees to work “smarter” (i.e., do more with less).
In the ’50s, that golden age of economic expansion, social thinkers wondered if individualism was getting swallowed up by the corporation; now the individual is to be modeled after the corporation. He is the CEO of his own “highly effective” self — or, as suggested in “Brand You,” an article in Fast Company magazine last year, a valuable product with his own unique brand.
My misgiving about the Franklin Planner is that, if used as directed, it seems that you put so much of your life into it that there’s not much left in you. You don’t live your life, you live your “life plan” — or rather, you conduct business as a microcorporation whose product is a “full life experience.” And maybe the fact that you’re so organized and achievement-oriented makes you more focused on the organization and achievement than on yourself and those around you. Maybe you plan yourself into a well-regulated, highly effective stupor. Maybe the Franklin Planner becomes like lithium, your highs and lows brought into line with the little kick you get from checking off a successfully completed task. Even if there’s a family crisis, Hyrum Smith soothingly tells you, on the tape, how to deal with it so that “you’re still in control. The bottom line of the use of this book is control.”
And so your life is parsed into the days of the Planner, days in which you wisely fill all your time, yet without things getting frantic or out of control — or rather, things might get out of control, but you don’t. You create a systematized history in the Planner, transferring your memory to it; in fact, according to Smith, you don’t have to remember anything, because it’s in your Planner. After using it for 21 days, he promises, “You’ll not only scare yourself, you’ll intimidate everybody on your block!” (Picture the neighbors, chatting over the back fence: “That son-of-a-gun Joe, he’s so organized it makes your head spin!”)
After using the Planner for the rest of your life, you might not recall what you did — but you’ll have shelves lined with fat, leather-look binders, filled with hundreds of carefully cross-referenced pages, that can tell you what you can’t. I wonder if the children of dearly departed Franklinites will save these archives.
As for my own Planner pages, they’re now tucked into my battered old
Filofax — a somewhat lame disguise that indicates my ongoing ambivalence
about the System. I was not a 21-day convert, nor have I established a set
of Governing Values and Long-Term Goals .
That’s not to say that the Planner hasn’t been quite handy in other respects: As a freelance writer, I found it helped in writing this very story and managing the busywork involved with getting other stories done as well. But some of my days have big chunks of white space reserved for “working” — which, as any freelancer will confirm, involves significant amounts of procrastination. How do you plan for that?
The true Franklin acolytes have a solution for this and probably for every other excuse I could come up with for my slack planning skills. I’ve heard several, and don’t want to hear any more. But I’m wary of getting too close to the System. When I start to scare myself, as Smith puts it, then I’ll know my addiction to control is getting out of control.
