"People treat their daily planners the way monks and nuns used to treat their prayer books. They keep them close at all times. They clasp them with missionary zeal as they head from meeting to meeting. With long-range and short-range plans, people plot out their workplace eschatology. The planner in today's society carries much mana, or spiritual power, and forgetting one's planner is a major sin of omission. Like medieval displays of conspicuous piety, the planner announces to the world that you are one whose life and time are worth something. The jewel-encrusted covers of medieval psalm books and the ornately illuminated pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels announced the value and importance of their books' contents. The sober leatherette of the daily planner, as plain as the binding of a King James Bible, holds lists of engagements no less valuable to us than the word of God was to the ancients.
"The parallels between religious books of hours and our contemporary ones reflect our respective sets of values. While the intricate Celtic knots of the Book of Kells invited us to contemplate the interrelationship between the world of time and the world of eternity, the various interactive sections of the modern planner show only the interweaving of the various clock-bound schedules that make up the fabric of our contemporary lives. The Bible contained prophecies of the distant future, but the planner's prophecy consists only of this week's engagements, meticulously penciled in, which merely fulfill last week's commitments of where we will be at a particular time. The alphabetized lists of phone numbers and e-mail addresses are arrayed like the genealogies of the elders of Zion; the brief almanacs and conversion tables are like synoptic texts guiding you through the valley of the shadow of international business travel; and in the back reaches of the volume, like the Book of Revelation, is stored the apocalyptic vision of the five-year plan. Yet none of this points beyond our horizontal realm to the vertical realm in which we also live."
