how much can I decorate my planner at work without looking like a kid?

A reader writes:

I have one of those intensely low-stakes questions that I would love to get your and the commentariat’s opinion on.

I like using paper planners. I like decorating them. I recently started a new job.

My question is twofold:

1. How much can I decorate my planner without people starting to look at me as an overgrown eight-year-old?

2. How much decorating can I do while physically at work? Some planning on paper feels fine to do while in the office but fiddling with stickers and different colored pens, maybe not? Where does one draw the line, so to speak?

I’ve attached two different types of planner spreads (they are not confidential and most likely not even understandable to outsiders so it would be fine to publish these).

Hmmm. I bet there’s going to be a wide range of opinions on this, in part because different things will fly in different offices, but to give you a very general rule, I’d say that what the first photo shows (different color inks and highlighting) is 100% fine and won’t even get a second glance, but the planner in the second photo would be A Lot for many offices.

One decorative sticker? Unremarkable. Multiple decorative stickers? Starts to look more like a craft project and younger/fluffier than what typically aligns with “professional” presentation. (I’m specifying “decorative” stickers here because I’m talking about the flowers, cloud, apple, and affirmations; the colored dots to set some items off are completely fine.) It’s also true that the more decoration there is, the more it starts to look like your focus is in the wrong place for work.

As for how much decorating you can do while physically at work; different color pens are fine; a lot of people use different colors of ink or colored labels to help organize their work, and it’s likely to come across as that (assuming you’re not sitting at your desk with a 100-color pen set, painstakingly using each of them). Slapping a single sticker or a handful of dots on a page, no big deal. More than that will come across oddly in enough offices that I wouldn’t do it.

This all goes triple when you’ve just started a new job and are still making an impression. You don’t want your early impression to be that you’re the sticker person; you want to be known for your work.

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