CIO — Almost 10 years ago, I worked at a company that bought planners for its employees. The company had recently been struggling, so we didn’t have too many perks. But to me, a free planner was worth any number of company lunches or all-you-can-drink river cruises. I am addicted to being organized. I get a jolt of accomplishment from writing down an appointment, a high from crossing out a completed task. As with most addictions, this one stems from weakness: I cannot remember anything.
Little did I realize I would become an electronic organizer junkie, not merely reassured by lists to jog my memory but dependent on the latest planning gadget just to be able to function. Eventually, I traded up my planner for a PDA so that it would be even easier to keep track of every waking moment. But writing all that down has the curious psychological effect of committing you to it all. The result is a vicious cycle of too many obligations that require you to keep up with evermore sophisticated gadgets.
From Paper to PDA
The planner sucked me in quickly. I loved having such a handy package for my calendar, address book, lists of upcoming deadlines and ideas for birthday gifts. But then I got a backache from carrying the dang thing around. It got heavier and heavier, crammed with directions to friends’ houses, notes about what I’d plant in the garden, e-mails I’d printed out with meeting agendas. And as those pages piled up, it started taking longer to remember where everything was. After a while, I began using my planner less.
Then two years ago, my life got complicated. First, I had a child. Then, I got this job, and with it, a daily commute and a more structured workday. Initially, I went back to the planner, but it was too hefty to schlepp around every day. Plus I was spending too much time copying entries from the monthly calendar in the planner to the daily calendar in the planner. So I left it at home and started using the desktop organizer on my computer at work. That was fine for a few months, until a scheduling snafu left me without a baby-sitter the morning I had an early meeting. (I had repeatedly forgotten to note on my office calendar that my husband also had an appointment at the crack of dawn.) A colleague bailed me out, but I realized I was fighting a new battle of organization with weapons from the last war. I needed both to travel light and keep more details of my life with me.
