A Gift That Became Infrastructure
In prison, time isn’t something you keep.
It’s something that keeps you.
Every clock on the wall tells you what you can’t do yet:
Chow time. Yard open. Count time. Yard recall.
And every night: another day down, another day closer to wherever you’ve got to go.
At SkunkWorks, we ask something different:
What is this time for?
When Passion Planner sent us their planners, they gave us more than a stack of books. They gave us a way to make time visible—and usable. In a place designed to make the days blur, we needed a tool to sharpen focus. To make decisions visible. To make momentum trackable. To see the future clearly.
We integrated the planners into our systems the way any high-performing organization would. We pair them with Backward Design, starting with the outcomes we’re driving toward—whether it’s a policy reform pitch, a research partnership, or a culture shift—and mapping backward to define the path.
Every Friday, during our leadership meetings, we don’t just talk strategy—we schedule it.
One of our artists uses his planner to break down the mural initiative into distinct phases: community co-design, sketch approval, prep, execution. He hasn’t used a Gantt chart—yet—but he works backward from deadlines like a project manager.
Our events lead logs each First Friday down to the hour: setup, check-in, gameplay, food flow, teardown. Then he annotates it. Adjusts. Iterates. That’s user-centered design, midstream.
Another team member tracks which policies we’ve mapped, which stakeholders we’ve engaged, and which timelines align with the legislative calendar. That’s systems thinking in action.
This is what capacity looks like.
Not potential—practice.
Not ideas—execution.
Time is our most limited resource. We don’t have open weekends or project buffers. Every minute we use to build this work is carved out of a rigid system. The Passion Planners let us hold that time in our hands. And once we can see it, we can manage it.
Prioritize. Sequence. Allocate. Protect.
This is how we build inside a prison:
With tools. With frameworks. With intention.
Thank you, Passion Planner. You didn’t just send us stationery.
You helped us structure a future.