PurposeThis paper aims to analyze documentary planning tools for an everyday life project, the wedding, to study how “document work” is constructed in this setting.Design/methodology/approachUsing Law and Lynch's study of birdwatching guides for novices as a framework, nine commercially‐available wedding planning guides targeted toward the primary planner, almost universally the bride, were analyzed.FindingsAs Law and Lynch found, part of a novice's apprenticeship requires learning how to “see” in ways that are socially organized in and through texts. The paper shows how characteristics of birdwatching guides (naturalistic accountability, a picture theory of representation, and the strategic use of texts) are also evident in wedding planners, and how the very features that make these guides usable also occasion troubles for their users. Wedding planning guides treat the bride as a novice and instruct her in seeing wedding‐related tasks and times as amenable to management. However, planning a wedding requires multiple tasks and times that may be intertwined in ways that make both their representation and their execution highly complex.Research limitations/implicationsThe need for both temporal and thematic access highlights more general problems of knowledge organization in presenting a complex planning project in a linear and paper format.Originality/valueAs workplace principles of time and project management are increasingly applied to everyday life, this paper provides a needed case study of the ways that everyday recordkeeping contributes to the novice bride's gendered apprenticeship and embeds her work within broader organizational and ideological systems.

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The purpose of this study was to identify the epistemic or knowledge practices of theater production professionals within the framework of cultural-historical activity theory. The script of the play was considered to be the principal mediating artifact used by theater professionals to accomplish the object of telling the story of the play. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 theater production professionals on two separate productions of the same play. Data analysis comprised identifying instances of the script in the role of mediating artifact, as well as specific epistemic practices. The script has affordances as both work and as a work in the eyes of theater production professionals. Seven epistemic practices related to how the script is used were identified: reading, classifying and inscribing, gathering, representing, learning, remembering, and standardizing.

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PurposeThis article explores the varied ways that individuals create and use calendars, planners and other cognitive artifacts to document the multiple temporalities that make up their everyday lives. It reveals the hidden documentary time work required to synchronize, coordinate or entrain their activities to those of others.Design/methodology/approachWe interviewed 47 Canadian participants in their homes, workplaces or other locations and photographed their documents. We analyzed qualitatively; first thematically to identify mentions of times, and then relationally to reveal how documentary time work was situated within participants' broader contexts.FindingsParticipants' documents revealed a wide variety of temporalities, some embedded in the templates they used, and others added by document creators and users. Participants' documentary time work involved creating and using a variety of tools and strategies to reconcile and manage multiple temporalities and indexical time concepts that held multiple meanings. Their work employed both standard “off the shelf” and individualized “do-it-yourself” approaches.Originality/valueThis article combines several concepts of invisible work (document work, time work, articulation work) to show both how individuals engage in documentary time work and how that work is situated within broader social and temporal contexts and standards.