Getting Things Undone

Yesterday I popped into an Office Depot to get a few basic office supplies. You know, the usual stuff one stocks up on at the beginning of every year: archive boxes, extra hanging folders, that sort of thing. And of course, as I’m wont to do, I lingered way too long over at the organizer/planner aisle.

After studying the sad-looking options — does Office Depot and its brethren in the big-box office supply industry really think that ugly, flat fluorescent lighting and crappy, warehouse-like interiors inspire us to buy more paper and pens? — I picked out an efficient, shrink-wrapped refill of tabbed pages for my Day-Timer portfolio. Each section offers a whole week’s worth of space to fill with the tasks and to-do lists and meetings and appointments of my life, with some room left over for scribbles and random notes. Oh, and it even has pages for birthdays and anniversaries, mileage records and business expenses. If I’d paid a little extra, I could’ve thrown in a plastic envelope for those receipts that always seem to take over my purse by the end of the day.

I threw it into my cart, along with the archive boxes and hanging file folders and wandered around the store for awhile, admiring the pretty calendars and tax software displays and even the sprawling, ghostly block of office furniture that looked as if it had been suddenly abandoned in the wake of a disaster. Except, of course, the desks were bare and dust-free, although some drawers appeared to be on the verge of falling out of their units.

All the while, I don’t know why, but I kept thinking about the neat little package of refill pages for my neglected planner, tucked away somewhere underneath the archive box. And I thought, Uhm, do I really need this?

And no, it wasn’t the kind of Do I really need this question one asks during a moment of financial need. I wasn’t balking at the $20 expense. Rather, the question truly was existential: Do I really, truly need this?

I have a Palm Centro in which my entire life is ostensibly organized. Were I to lose the data in it, I would be distraught, perhaps even a little hysterical. My to-do list has sub-folders, with tasks dutifully ranked from 1-5 according to order of importance, and filed into categories such as Business, Housekeeping, Online Shopping, Errands, Groceries, Personal, Phone Calls, and God knows what else. I have become the kind of wife who is obsessed with ensuring that, should I be broadsided by a truck tomorrow, B. would know exactly what to do to pick up right where I left off in our ever-so-complicated life.

And that’s not all. I also have a Google calendar to which B. has access and where I carry a nearly identical list of tasks and appointments. I keep it open on my desktop whenever I’m on my computer (which is to say, nearly all my waking hours) and plow through it when I can. (Although in all honesty, half of the tasks usually end up getting moved to a different day. Every day.)

So I stood there in the middle of this pathetic warehouse devoted to the American fetish for office supplies and wondered, Do I really bloody need this? Is my life such that I require three wholly separate and ugly little tools to keep body and soul together? Have I arrived at a point in my life where I believe I can actually achieve the elusive delusion dream of total control, if only I could find the perfect tool to do it?

I didn’t buy the refill sheets. They went right back on the shelf, along with a few dozen other ways to give one the impression that life can be broken down into neat little boxes and that dreams can be fulfilled if only we could reach the end of the to-do list.

It’s not that I’ve turned my back on my obsession with time management and organization. It’s just that I sit here and wonder, When exactly did I suddenly become obsessed with time management and organization? In my college years I got by with the free little spiral planner distributed by the university to all new students. In graduate school I didn’t even have a planner — the syllabus and any nearby calendar were enough to remind me of anything critical that needed my attention. I didn’t need a planner to remind me of birthdays or anniversaries or even telephone numbers — to this day I still remember the birthday of a guy I dated twenty years ago. It’s not that I necessarily need to remember the birthday of a guy I dated twenty years ago, but I’m fairly sure that the only birthdays I really need to remember don’t require any special software or fancy little Day-Timer sheets.

A year ago I read David Allen’s international bestseller, Getting Things Done. I listened to the abridged audio version twice while on breathtaking runs through our Grand Junction neighborhood. I wanted it to give me the answers to life, to make some sense of what is often a confusing morass of random decisions and circumstances. I wanted to believe the veneer of calm and order it promised, that my life really would be all gold and gloss and that success was just a Task List away. Of course, I never really stopped to question how I defined “success,” or if I even had a definition of it that wasn’t heavily borrowed from the distorted version of the American Dream peddled on late-night infomercials and the ads in the back of business magazines.

I guess I’m still under that spell. As I type this I’m also putting the finishing touches of my new Outlook 2007 software program, yet another attempt to corral the disparate threads of my unraveling life with a brand-spankin’ new tool. I may have surrendered the Day-Timer dream, but old habits die hard. Really, really hard.

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