Dopp Juice Archive

I’m sitting in a public computer lab right now. Ten minutes ago, a cell phone rang and a woman answered it. While she was still in her intial greetings (“Oh, hi Sam!”), the woman beside me turned and announced, “I thought we weren’t supposed to use cell phones in here.” The woman on the cell phone, overhearing, made her way to the door as politely as possible. Just now, Ms. Critical’s cell phone rang. Loudly. She answered it, and apparently it was an emergency. In between “Oh, no!” and “Okay, just tell me what happened,” she must have realized her own hippocrisy. She quickly lowered her voice and rushed to the door. When she returned, her face was bright red, and she whispered “sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” I think there’s a lesson here — at least for me. When you think you’re in the right, keep your mouth shut for at least another ten minutes.

I’ve noticed that whenever I need work, whenever I’m silently or outwardly asking myself or the world around me to bring me projects, they come. My mother used to always say, “Knock and the door will open unto you. Ask and you shall receive.” (I think this is biblical.)I believe it. Just by consciously thinking that you need something, you’ll be more aware of the opportunities around you, and you’ll eventually find it. Somewhere. Somehow.

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.