Harvested_trees_courtesy_Alan_Stewart_cc_licenseImage of harvested trees (don’t worry, they’ll grow back) © Copyright Alan Stewart and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons licence.

If, like me, you set yourself hard deadlines and make formal appointments only when you have to, but still you’ve found your lightly-planned lifestyle requires more planning space than monthly planners or standard calendars provide, the House of Doolittle Academic Weekly Appointment Planner 16 July 2014 – 02 August 2015 (HOD27702-15, “Academic Weekly July-July”; hereafter, HDWAP1415) should suit your purposes.

Be warned: HDWAP1415 provides very little space for weekend planning. This isn’t a problem for me because I always have plenty of space open on nearby days to add rare weekend deadlines and appointments, using HDWAP1415’s tiny weekend spaces solely as the starting point for arrows (or a place for asterisks, circled numbers, or other symbols) indicating where I’ve listed the deadline or appointment. If you don’t spend most of your weekends in stasis, as I do, or if you’re one of those busy-busy obsessively-plan-everything people….Well, you really should be looking into a daily planner or one of those big appointment books dentists’ offices and photo studios use, shouldn’t you?

House of Doolittle emphasizes that this planner is “Recycled….100% Post-Consumer Paper,” which is supposed to be “green” (environment-friendly) and so encourage you to choose this product over kill-a-tree competitors. Marketers are so proud of this that they include a “28 years ‘going-green’ timeline” at the end of the planner. Had our nation sensibly gone nuclear years ago as it should have done, rather than continuing to produce almost all its electricity using fossil fuels, marketers’ pride might make sense. As it is, making a planner from paper owing its existence to fossil-fuel-dependent recycling plants hardly seems something to brag about. After all, non-recycled paper is made from a paradigmatically renewable resource: trees. Granted, if creation of usable paper through recycling uses no more electricity than creation of such paper directly from trees (which I have a sneaking suspicion isn’t the case), there’s certainly no harm in recycling paper. But the claim that it’s “green” in a special way other papers are not doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

(Don’t even get me started on the “greenness” of electric vehicles! Just remember where we get the electricity to charge these things.)

So, thank you, House of Doolittle, for a serviceable planner. In the future, though, please spare us the Politically Correct marketing.

This review has also been posted, less nicely formatted, on Amazon.