Dopp Juice Archive

Somewhere near the top of my list-of-things-to-do-this-year is getting organized (at least, I think it’s near the top, but I forget where I put that list…). Not just pens-in-a-cup organized, but actual on-the-ball, able-to-size-up-life organized. That’s why I followed a link to the “free” D*I*Y Planner page. It claimed flexibility and customization. I imagined it would set me up with a system I could just print out, patch together, and throw in my bag. But no, its first step is to buy a planner. A real planner. And that’s where all my troubles began in the first place…Reasons I dislike off-the-shelf planners:

• They’re expensive. If I buy cheap, they will fall apart or annoy me for some other reason.
• They’re always customized for the wrong person: not me. Granted, this is what D*I*Y Planner claims to fix, and they seem to do a pretty good job at it. But if I’m going to spend that much money on a real planner in the first place, I’d like it to work with me without requiring a complete makeover.
• They’re either too big to carry around, or too small to hold what I need. I have not yet found an in-between.
• The calendar pages have a similar problem. The spreads never give enough space for daily lists and task blocks, unless I go day-by-day, in which case I can’t view my whole week at once (and I’m now carrying too many pages around).
• The brands tend to have proprietary page sizes and hole placements, so you can’t mix and match.

The likely solution to all this would be to just buy a PDA, but I’m not convinced it will fix my organizational crisis. For one, they’re even more expensive. Second, I don’t trust hard drives with important information. They tend to crash. Third, I’m at a computer all day long anyway — it’s nice to take a break and look at real paper. The real solution is time and money — money for a decent planner and time to customize it. In fact, the solution to everything is time and money. Interestingly, these are two things I lack right now.