The Planner

The habit, as entered in the book

The Planner’s move is allocation. Money is given a purpose before it is used – each part assigned to a named job in advance – and the assigning is only half the habit. The other half is the review: the Planner goes back over what actually happened and holds it against what was planned, regularly, as a matter of course.

Three readings on the dials

Impulse reads low: a purchase that was not in the plan has a hurdle to clear, and mostly it does not clear it. Tracking reads close – reviewing the record against the plan is the habit’s second half, so the record is always being read. The feeling nearest to money is control: not the thrill of having it, but the steadiness of knowing where every part of it is meant to go.

The blind spot

The Planner’s unseen column is the plan itself. A plan firm enough to be useful can harden into one that treats the unplanned as a defect – the surprise bill, and just as much the spontaneous joy – so that ordinary life starts registering as a series of failures against the plan. Said kindly: the plan is a tool of the Planner’s, and the pattern does not always notice when it has become the other way round.

Whose frame this is

The Planner is one of five types in this site’s own descriptive frame – our own drawing, openly labelled as such, resting on no outside authority. Within it, no type holds the high ground. Planning is a habit some people have, described here in the same flat voice as the other four, and recommended no more than any of them.