Planning It, Old School

Yesterday the office manager stuck her head into my office and asked me if I wanted a planner for the next year. Someone had ordered refills and the company had sent a brand new leather folio along with a starter kit of inserts and she did not want to send it back. My first thought was “How very 1990’s of us to be using analog daily planners in this digital age.” Then I remembered that this was the same office that included a box of brand new 3.25” floppy disks (1.44 mb capacity!) as part of my welcome package--four months ago. My second thought (or would that be the third?) was “Heck yeah, I’ll take it” and I actually said that out loud. For some reason, the idea of having a new planner, analog or not, inspired me. There is something intoxicating about notebooks, potential creativity and (possibly) a new pen that I cannot resist.

After she brought it to me and I unwrapped all of the inserts, it dawned on me that, regardless my excitement, I was not going to go back to the Luddite way of conducting my life, adding phone numbers and daily tasks to a notebook when I already had a pretty good system within my digital world (like most people in the working world... outside The State Offices, that is). But the folio smelled good (Mmmm, leather) and it seemed like a waste to stick it in a drawer or on a shelf and forget about it. So I went online to see what FranklinCovey offered in the way of insert options, hoping to be inspired (or re-inspired) to use my new leather planner. Lo, on yonder home page blared the weekly special: 100 sheets of simply lined paper for the Classic planner (mine) for $5.00. I ordered two and decided I could use the folio as a writing notebook. A very fancy writing notebook. And I could add it to the other four, very plain, writing notebooks I have sitting strategically around the house and in my briefcase. And I already have my defense ready when my wife finds it in a random place (and she will) and she asks why I needed another notebook--albeit a fancy notebook--when I already have several that still have empty pages. I’ll ask her, “Have you smelled that notebook?” I’m pretty sure that will work.