Thursday, January 18, 2007
Begin the Begin
Written a few mornings ago on the first page of a new tablet:
Again I stare down another new notebook, an untested easel for my projections, hundreds of pages of glacial purity, perfectly clean and square, as if its eventual contents might be envisioned as something matching its current elegance - a coherent series of text dollops, beyond prediction in variety but all neatly trailing each other as a group, a chronological chain of consecutive writings….
As if, as if. My last notebook suggests differently. I’m leaving it behind now for the first time since I started using it as my “primary,” about ten months ago. Once it too held the promise of the tablua rasa, but it’s been a long time since then. I’ve filled it pretty well and cleared it too. My writing is often a cumulative process – something I write in a few quick bursts will then be read and re-read over several bus rides, and is usually significantly edited if not rewritten each time. This results in a notebook in which nearly every page is covered with increasingly miniscule scrawls, bus-clumsy and variously in pen, pencil, different pens…. Each page has been perused and scrutinized several times; the intensity of that scrutiny still seems to permeate each sheet of paper. The cover, once a cheerful turquoise, is now worn and chafed. It’s still a reliable, solid notebook, but it is spent.
Rather, I’ve moved on to this new notebook. It’s classy – plastic covered with rounded corners, ripstop binding sheath, good pocket action and an interior divider. Hell, it even comes with note cards. It’s going to do well for me. I just can’t let its apparent perfection discourage my using it. It’s a little game I play on myself with every new notebook I get – I don’t think I have anything worthy to be the first thing in such an unspoiled resource, so I carry it around for several days trying to work up the gumption to give it an initial sullying so I can use it without further reservation. This time, though, this hesitancy to get started in the new notebook seems to have hit particularly acutely – perhaps because it’s coming at a time of so many other beginnings. It’s not just that it’s the new year, though that’s rife with sufficient symbolism right there. But there’s the cumulative effect of the other, parallel steps out and forward and into new beginnings that I’m facing these days:
* My omnipresent little spiral memo books are now a thing of the past. I like to carry a booklet for scrawling the briefest of notes to myself – reminders, notions, phrases, but not actual composition. It’s always been a top-bound pocket pad, but those tended to look sloppy after a while and the wire binding inevitably got crushed under the weight of my pure physical presence. But the holidays brought me plenty of fabulous “cahiers” memo pads by Moleskine™, which are now my new official first and only choice in memo memorialization. Slim, elegant, tightly lined, pocketed and thread-bound (much like myself in many ways), these now go everywhere with me. No more sitting on wire bindings; no more floppy sloppy covers. It’s less substance, with more efficiency. That’s a big step in the right direction.
* But also: My biggest personal millstone has for ten years been an overstuffed daily planner. When Kel first set me up with one it was a key tool for managing what was then a life teetering at the brink of chaos. With a new page each day larded with plentiful room for notes, prioritized tasks, appointments, and aspirations, the main binder only held three months of pages at a time so I had to “month up” with new pages from a reserve binder every month to keep a proper set of sheets on tap. This process of “monthing up” was an integral part of my planning and involved a dozen steps: installing new pages; removing old ones; indexing all notable events of the prior month by date; marking the upcoming birthdays for the next 60 days; reviewing all telephone messages received in the prior month; reviewing the prior month’s index of notable events; reviewing the prior year’s index of notable events for the current month; reviewing the Master Tasks list and updating as necessary; inputting the office administrative calendar into my monthly and daily planner pages; identifying my hours worked on a separately-funded project; and reviewing my “goals and aspirations” list. My current checksheet for performing these functions goes back to 2002.
Well, over the past several years I’ve progressively internalized most of the organizational fundamentals that my old day planner institutionalized for me. Less and less have I found significant benefit to my elaborate monthly planning rituals. At the same time, I came to realize that the planner had hundreds of blank memo pages I never used, dozens of outdated address pages and others I’d never get around to filling in, superfluous guides and tutorials on effective daily planning, and of course all the stuff I stuffed in it myself – photos and business cards and little bits of funny crap… it was a mess, clumsy and heavy and monolithic.
So this year I made a break and got me a new planning style – a slim, no-frills week-at-a-glance calendar, softsided and unencumbered with extraneities. So far it’s doing a great job keeping me on track – maybe better than my heavy, clunky eight ring binder did. I’ve got a full year on one two-page spread, cheerfully color coded to give me the big picture instantly. Every time I use it I revel in its efficiencies, and each time I slip it in my bag I am impressed with how small and light it is. It’s another case of giving up wasted space, wasted time, wasted bulk and wasted weight, for getting the job done faster and more cleanly. And since the job, this time, is “making everything run more smoothly,” I’m okay with making some progress on this front.
What, you think I’m done? No, I’m just beginning the “just beginnings.” More later - like tomorrow, maybe. Assuming the “new year smell” lasts that long.
