May 2026

I’m not a teacher. I make a planner app, and over the years I’ve heard from a lot of them. Here’s what I’ve learned about the gap between how teachers actually work and how planner apps are designed — and what the best ones in the world still get wrong. Full disclosure before we begin: I’m Takeya. I make Planner for iPad. I am not a teacher, and I’m not going to pretend to be one in this article. What…

It’s May. The planner you started in January has a few good weeks at the front, a slow fade in February, and a clean white silence after that. Here’s how to actually start again — without the guilt, the fresh-start fantasy, or the productivity sermon. There’s a specific kind of stillness inside a planner that’s been abandoned in February. You open it in May, hoping for some flicker of recognition, and what you find is a stranger’s handwriting. January’s goals…

In a country obsessed with the philosophy of time, paper never quite lost the argument. Walk into a Parisian bookstore in late August — La Hune in Saint-Germain, the labyrinthine Gibert Joseph on Boulevard Saint-Michel, the elegant stationery floor at Le Bon Marché — and you’ll notice something the rest of the world quietly stopped doing about a decade ago. The front tables are stacked with paper agendas. Not as a nostalgic flourish or a hipster reissue, but as a…

Tomoe River paper. A page a day. The smell of new ink in October. The Hobonichi Techo isn’t just a planner — it’s a ritual. So can an iPad really do what it does? I’m a Japanese developer who makes a planning app, and I’ll tell you the honest answer. Every September, something quietly happens in Japan. Stationery sections of department stores rearrange themselves. Loft, Tokyu Hands, Maruzen — they all clear out a wall, and overnight it fills with…

If you’ve been curious about ditching paper planners but love the feel of writing by hand, you’re in exactly the right place. The combination of an iPad and an Apple Pencil has become the closest thing we have to a paper notebook that never runs out of pages — and once you set it up properly, it’s hard to go back. I’m the developer of Planner for iPad, so I’ve spent years thinking about what makes handwritten digital planning actually…

You’ve tried the apps. Probably more than you’d like to admit. Here’s why most of them failed — and what an iPad planner actually needs to do for an ADHD brain. If you have ADHD and you’re reading this, there’s a very specific kind of fatigue you already know. It’s the fatigue of having tried — really tried — to use Notion, Todoist, TickTick, GoodNotes with a 47-page PDF planner, that one ADHD-specific app a YouTuber swore by, the bullet…

Most productivity apps are designed for people who like productivity apps. They reward you for setting up the system, not for getting work done. You spend an hour configuring tags, color codes, and database views — and at the end of it, you’ve planned nothing and built a museum exhibit about how organized you could be. Business professionals don’t have time for this. You have meetings stacked back-to-back, deliverables with real consequences, and a calendar that fills up faster than…

Most “best iPad apps” lists read like a sponsored catalog. Forty apps, no opinions, every one of them a 5-star miracle. That’s not useful. Here are five apps I actually recommend — the ones that justify owning an iPad in the first place. If your iPad mostly sits on the kitchen counter playing YouTube, this is the list that gets it off the counter. Full disclosure: I make one of the apps on this list. I’ll tell you which one…

There’s a quiet argument that’s been circulating for years: handwritten planners are inefficient. They’re slow. They don’t sync. You can’t search them. You can’t back them up. If you drop one in a puddle, your entire third quarter is gone. Apps, the argument goes, are simply better tools for getting things done. If you’ve ever stood in a stationery aisle holding a beautiful Hobonichi or Moleskine and felt a small wave of guilt — like you were about to choose…