I almost had a major moment of planner fail this week, on Monday. My life has been rather hectic lately between work, social events, a weekend course I’m taking, and moving into a new apartment (oh, and also, battling a determined cold). Last weekend, I didn’t have even a moment to sit down and breathe, never mind crack open my planner – I thought I had everything in my head, and while not under control, at least I knew what I was supposed to be doing and when.
With such a busy week, my to-do list was a long list of unchecked boxes, and with this thought in mind, I declined to open my planner Monday morning at work – I knew I would just be discouraged by the number of things I hadn’t done, and Monday wasn’t any better in terms of having time to actually do any of those things. It wasn’t until Monday at midday that I opened my planner – midday is when I have time to fit in a workout, and I like to record what I’ve done every day and some of the basic stats so that I have a quick and easy reference sheet. I opened my planner to the current week (trying my best to skip over the previous week’s undone tasks)…
….and lo and behold, what was written on Monday but a nine o’clock Skype interview with a prospective candidate for a summer internship at my language school. After I recovered from the mini heart attack and picked myself up off the ground after falling out of my chair, I noticed that thankfully the interview was at 9 pm and not 9 am (I hadn’t missed it!). And, of course, most importantly – I now knew that I had to do it.
The moral of the story? If I hadn’t been tracking my exercise in my planner, I would never have opened it on Monday, as I would have been too discouraged by the number of tasks and lack of time (and I was totally convinced that I had all my appointment type things in my head and was remembering all of them).
So, give it a try – track something in your planner that forces you to open it every day, be it exercise, water intake, number of steps, mood, weather, your outfit of the day, number of red traffic lights on your commute to work, text messages sent over the course of the day, how many baskets you made on the Facebook Messenger game…
Organizedly yours,
L.
The Organizeaholic 