Married to the man with a plan

My husband is the one for making lists. For years he’s been singing the praises of writing things down and crossing things off. It’s satisfying to draw a line through something that’s been done, he tells me. It’s exhilarating, he says.

When our children were young, his lists included chores expected of them. On Saturday mornings when they padded into the kitchen and saw him at the table, pen in hand, hunched over his yellow legal pad, composing, they groaned.

He still uses a yellow legal pad every now and then and if our adult kids are home and they see him with it, they make a beeline line for where he isn’t. But it’s a rare sighting because sometime in the mid-1980s, he traded up and bought himself a Franklin Planner, which, back then, was the granddaddy of planners, because it was marketed not just as a planner, but as a time management system.

No longer was it enough to simply sit down, make a list of things to do, do them, and then cross them off. The Franklin Planner promised that all the things everyone has to do every day could be done more efficiently, if prioritized.

And so began what would be a long relationship between my husband and categories A, B, and C. These were designated classifications to help busy people — and who isn’t busy? — manage time. A was the designated imperative, a task that the Franklin Planner said had to be done first. B, was, can you guess? Not as important as A. And C meant if you get to it, fine. If not there’s always tomorrow.

My husband’s Saturday morning list for many years looked like this:

A: Mow lawn (Rob).

A: Rake lawn (Rob)

A: Sweep garage (Rob).

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B: Vacuum car (Lauren)

C: Dust (Julie remembers always being assigned dusting)

My husband loved A, B, and C so much, the economy of it, that he bought a Franklin Planner for me, too, certain that I also would fall in love as he had. “It will make your life easier,” he said. It didn’t. “It will save you time,” he said. It didn’t. “It will help you to be organized,” he said. It didn’t. All the Franklin Planner succeeded in doing for me was to add yet another layer of decision-making.

“Buy shower curtain and cat food” I remember writing one morning under the “PRIORITIZED DAILY TASK LIST column. And then, immediately, I got stuck. Was this an A, B, or C? Which should I choose? Were we out of cat food — were two cans sufficient for two cats for one day? And how bad was the shower curtain, anyway? Was the shower curtain a C and the cat food a B? And if I didn’t buy cat food today, would cat food be an A tomorrow? And why did I put them both on the same line, anyway? What was I thinking?

I gave up on my Franklin Planner almost before I started it. But my husband used his for a long time, for longer than our cats, Fresca and Ring Ding, survived. He has them still lined up neatly on a shelf in his office (the planners, not the cats ), thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of his handwritten to-do’s neatly checked off. It’s a diary of sorts, appealing to me now, in retrospect.

These days he uses his iPhone to make his lists. And he continues to encourage me to follow his lead. He shows me how easy the Reminders app is and how convenient it is, too, to always have your lists with you.

“See,” he says, and scrolls through grocery lists, packing lists, lists of jokes, and his list of long-term projects.

There is no reason for me not to use this app. I write notes on random pieces of paper that I lose and I scribble in notebooks, which all look alike. Our stove broke and I measured its dimensions. And wrote them down. In a notebook. And drove to the appliance store. Without the notebook, which — this happened a year ago — still has not been found.

I tell people who tell me they want to write to carry paper and pen and jot down their ideas when they come to them because these thoughts will vanish. And this is good and true advice. Except that sometimes, oftentimes, the pen can’t be found or it’s the paper that’s disappeared or — worst-case scenario — the paper with the brilliant idea written in brilliant prose vanishes.

Our phones connect to the cloud. The cloud connects to our laptops and tablets. It’s harder to lose something when that something is in more than one place. The Reminders app feels like a slam dunk.

I text my grandson, Adam, who is 19 and hooked up to everything Apple, to ask if he uses the Reminders app. He texts back:

1. No I don’t. I don’t think it is reliable.

2. I use the Franklin Planner for school. It’s great for scheduling.

3. Unlike online notes, it’s nice to be able to cross off stuff.