Organizational Experiment

Organization, the sustainable kind, is not one of my qualities. I'm good at organizing someone else's chaos and creating a workable system for them. But when it comes to daily life, I'm damn good at eventually wrecking whatever I've set up. I can't tell you how often my debit card doesn't make it in the slot it belongs in my wallet and the frantic rooting through my entire purse because I couldn't be bothered to take a split second and put it in place.

I'm a chronic case. Some of it *cough* is just who I am. And some of it is the product of taking care of other scatterbrained or disinterested people. And by disinterested, I mean they don't want to do it & can't be bothered with it. By default, that leaves me.

Oh, poop!

A while back, I swapped out a pocket calendar for my phone's built in calendar app to keep track of appointments and my daily gratitudes. None of the productivity apps I looked through seemed to offer something that would work any better for my purposes. Recently, the social media corkboard site full of millions of good ideas few people ever actually tackle has been suggesting I check out something called a bullet journal. It also suggests I check out ballet slippers, weird recipes, credit cards, a hundred thousand words to use beside "said" and something called spoon ornaments. Given the wonky algorithm making these suggestions, I didn't give any thought to the journal thing.

I didn't give it another thought until I was talking with someone who happens to be a neuropsychologist. She brought up the bullet journal and talked about how functional it is and why. I was fascinated. And a little annoyed. I don't like to jump on bandwagons, and according to the number of ads I see for these things, they're everywhere. And according to the web search results I got when I decided to look into how to journal the bullet way, there is no end to the vlogs from people explaining theirs and what nifty things they keep track of. Skin care routines (seriously?), meal planning, vlog ideas, blog ideas, appointments, bills, so on and so forth.

There is seemingly no end to all the ways people utilize these things. And seemingly no end to the setup involved.

Since my time is strained enough as it is, I'm going simple and direct and starting with the basics. Day to day, monthly, & future plans. I'm trying to keep track of when I have to pay my parents' bills, refill prescriptions, schedule writing time, keep track of doctor visits & medical stuff, etc. My skin care routine hasn't varied in about 20 years, so I think I'm good there. If I stick to it and see the use in adding more frivolous things to keep track of then I'll do so.

And I'll check in on here about it from time to time. Because surely reading about somebody else trying an organizational method with data migration in an analog manner must be worthy of a blog post.

Amen.