Whenever I'm confused about how the world seems to be going, I go back in time. Not way back to Nero's Rome or Aeschylus's Athens, just to Mom and Dad's Detroit. It's not that I believe their generation did everything right or anything like that. I know--they voted for Nixon and wore real fur and believed that when it came to feeding babies, formula won out over breast milk any old day--but they did okay, you know?

Looking back at my parents' lives serves as a marker. I take any area of concern, go back those two short generations, and I compare notes. It's instructive. Lately, I've had reason to look at this bygone generation again, this time to see how they ran their lives. Not in the large sense of preserving life and limb, raising children, and being good citizens, but in the small, detailed sense. How did they keep track of appointments? How did they make sure they got done what they set out to do?

And it turns out they used calendars. Calendars, same as the ancient Mayans. Calendars--hanging on the wall--where they jotted down a few important things. Or those little desk calendars that measured three inches square and sat on your desk. You know, with a black plastic base (ahhh, plastic!) and a metal clip that held the pages on and allowed the user to flip over one small page each day. They wrote reminders there. Meet with Victor about the GM project. Friday is little Billy's birthday. Get those reports out on the Jones account. And that was that. They didn't miss Christmas, forget important celebrations, or not show up for meetings any more than any other age.

Now come forward again to the present generation. What's with us?

Welcome to the world of Day Planners. Big ones. Heavy suckers. Bound in Corinthian leather and as cumbersome to cart around as a hardbound copy of War and Peace. With hundreds of pages, colorful tabs, alarms even, and "project tracking ability" for up to 44 different projects. Huh? If you've got 44 different projects going, you're not organized, honey, you're overworked.

The name of this game is productivity. If you can't prove you're productive, you have no right to be here on Earth breathing air, taking up space, and just generally making a nuisance of yourself. I remember productivity from when I entered the work force as a twenty-two-year-old. It was a part of life, an aspect, not the whole of it. A generally accepted principle was that workers should try to be as productive as they could be. Limit breaks. Don't talk too much. Keep your mind on your work. But another generally accepted principle was that there exists a point of diminishing returns.

If I'm not mistaken, the optimal productivity level was considered to be somewhere around 89%. Beyond this point, you made your employees so productive that they became unproductive. It was accepted as truth that workers needed "down time," they needed to develop relationships with other workers which required friendly conversation from time to time. Disallow this and you wind up with an automaton, an uncreative, isolated worker who might just freak out and shoot up the place one day, leading to some major un-productivity.

But apparently today we have somehow narrowed the gap between 89 and 100%. There is no room for down time or just plain goofing around. No talk at the water cooler, no checking out those cute pictures in your neighbor's cubicle, no wasteful "How was your week-end?" stuff. These days we're taking aim at 100% with both barrels. Our aim is true and we're taking no prisoners.

We can thank the planner people for much of the emphasis on achieving this maximum productivity in our lives. Today, everyone has a planner. And everything goes into the planner. There are monthly summary sheets, daily task prioritizers, action item lists, even "role" reminders, that keep us apprised of the different roles we play in life. (Great for actors.) There are seminars to make us more productive and help us lick inertia. (If it dares rear its ugly head, we beat it back with "task controls" and "procrastination blockers.") There are special places for Christmas lists, wish lists, and favorite quotes. I have a friend who has even designed her own "venting and demon-wrestling section" where she spouts off about who is bugging her. (Even today's most productive office still contains people who bug you.)

The Mother of all Planners is the Franklin. The Franklin Life Management System promises nothing less than fulfillment and satisfaction. We learn to recognize what is "vital" and what is merely "urgent," and even assign numerical values to aspects of our lives (children=8; wife=7; new Saab=9). They ask us to declare our long-range goals, our intermediate goals, and our values. They have planners for elementary school children. And on the Franklin family calendar, they even ask for a "family mission statement." We were losers. Our family never had a mission statement nor anything close. We did try to stay solvent, to avoid divorce, and one year we even took the kids to Disney World. But we never had a mission statement.

All of this in the name of Ben Franklin.

I want to scream out at the Franklin Planner people: Gentlemen: I knew Ben Franklin, and you're NO Ben Franklin. Ben Franklin was the guy who grinned maniacally while leaning into a crashing thunderstorm, clad in patent leather boots that didn't allow him to bend his knees and that shirt with the goofy collar and daring lightning to come to him. He was a guy with not one, but two aliases. A raging revolutionary with a photographic memory. Our Ben needed a day planner?

Well, whether Ben would have used a planner or not, I understand the ostensible purpose of them. You don't miss appointments. You're not late to meetings. You don't neglect to call clients. But hey--I'm also no slouch in the philosophy department, either. I read. I'm down with the existentialists.

The real purpose of such an oversized, overbearing, over-the-top example of productivity overkill is to keep the plannee from looking at some pretty scary fundamental stuff. If we can manage to keep ourselves busy enough with appointments, listing what there is to accomplish, figuring out our values and recording them in the proper space in our planners, it keeps our minds off what lies ahead for all of us--large or small, productive or unproductive, CEO or entry-level. How could my life be meaningless? My planner is full. How can I die? I'm due at a conference on Thursday.

Yes, things have definitely gotten more complicated and farther removed from some basic truths since Mom and Dad's Detroit days. And I doubt we're going to turn back the clock. So, okay. If we're gonna keep this up, fine. But let's go a step a further, let's put some deeper truth into it. Somewhere amidst all those alarms and task reminders and procrastination blockers, I recommend a bold entry, preferably in permanent marker: Meet the Grim Reaper. No further tasks necessary.

MARGERY GUEST balances unavoidable existential dread and the desire to live productively in Grand Rapids, Michigan.