Road to Efficiency Gets Rocky
/The Boston Herald
God bless him. He hasn't given up on me. He keeps right on trying no matter how trying I get.
He prods, cajoles, bribes and cheers, "You can do it! I know you can," offering me multi-colored files with multi-colored tabs, presenting me with an organizational outline that he's created and highlighted, just for me.
I can't do it, I tell him. I'm hopeless. My mother was right. I don't know how to put things away. I walk right over piles of stuff that shouldn't be there. I collect newspapers, magazines, books, letters, cards, things. Where do all these things belong?
A place for everything and everything in its place. That's my guy, my very own organizational guru who will be chanting about the benefits of three-ring binders while standing over my grave.
He keeps lugging home books he's read and underlined. He keeps making suggestions, ("You need a proper work environment.") and pithy comments ("Life is time. Make it count.") and buying me things to create order out of chaos.
He thinks he can change me.
Okay, so the Franklin Planner he bought me has improved my life. I write in it every day, just as he instructed. I make a "to do" list and prioritize. Prioritization, my husband says, is the key to happiness.
How you prioritize is easy. You make a list and then you decide what you absolutely have to do, what you should do and what you don't want to do and you letter these things, A, B and C. You do the A's first and if you have time you do the B's and then you attack the C's and if you don't get to the C's you move them to the next day where the entire process begins again.
Fine. Simple. The problem is I tend to write this list after the fact, jotting down what I've done after I've done it. This doesn't help me to remember what I need to do or get to me to do what I don't want to do. It only helps me to remember if I've done a thing.
The one other neat thing about my Franklin Planner is that it's a handy place to keep phone numbers. Not all phone numbers because there aren't enough pages, but some, the most used ones. All the other numbers belong in my Rolodex, which Mr. I Am Organized and You Can Be Too also purchased for me. Yesterday, a friend called to ask for the number of a mutual acquaintance. I looked in my Franklin Planner and it wasn't there so I checked my Rolodex. Still no luck, so I turned on my Casio Solar Data Bank, which I bought myself, to carry in my pocketbook because the Franklin Planner is way too big and no one carries around a Rolodex.
But the number wasn't there, either, so I reached for the phone book, but it wasn't where it belongs, so I put my friend on hold, dialed information and got the number this way.
A simple thing, finding a phone number. They're all simple things, finding keys, gloves, glasses, the book I was reading, separating papers that have been read from papers that need to be read, filing letters, faxes, bills to be paid.
"You have to clean out your files. And clean off your desk. And answer your mail as it comes in," he says. "You have way too many books in there. You should put the ones you don't use downstairs."
He brought home cartons for the books. I've piled copies of "Bride's Magazine" in one and my children's mail, which I need to forward to them, in another.
You'd think he'd give up on me. He hasn't. His newest gift? "Amazing Organization Strategies." He gave it to me Tuesday. Yesterday I went looking for it. "Have you read it yet?" he asked yesterday.
I didn't have the heart to tell him I can't even find it.
