To the planner born

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, Douglas Johnston, a Newfoundland-based IT consultant, became aware that a laptop- and PDA-equipped youth sitting near him in a coffeeshop was sneering at his comparatively old-fashioned day planner.

''One hour, another coffee, and a cranberry muffin later, I had a plan for this site," he recounts in a post to DIYPlanner.com, a community website dedicated to the cult-like pleasures of ''paper-based organizational products" from FranklinCovey-type personal planners to Moleskine notebooks. The site, which launched last weekend (and whose title is borrowed from a customizable, printable planning system that Johnston himself designed and makes freely available for downloading), aims to revive our ''fading connection with paper."

E-mail and banking online are great, Johnston explained in an e-mail interview. But ''paper and ink, tangible and credible, reflect back a sense of humanity, and years after we have gone, can still remain as a testament to both our idle musings and great accomplishments," he said. Active topics of discussion at the site so far include using day planners to increase not only productivity but creativity, tips on printing on 3x5 cards from an HP Laserjet 1200, and step-by-step instructions on how to make duct-tape cases to house one's ''Hipster PDA" (as carefully organized stacks of index cards are now known).

So far, users of DIYPlanner.com--who, like Johnston, most emphatically are not technophobes--appear to agree with his worldview. ''In this age of accelerated pace, cold technology, and reduced social connections," offers Matthew Cornell, an Amherst-based research programmer, ''I think paper might offer us a small opportunity to feel and share better."

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail glenn@globe.com.