Perfection

Not here, but I got your attention didn’t I?

This is one of those posts where I am just rambling about what’s on my mind, so if you’re looking for knitting or cats, you’re out of luck today.

Here’s the thing; I was thinking about my ongoing quest to find the perfect organizational tool this morning. It never actually happens. I find a bag or a gadget or whatever that seems to have all of the right elements and every time I put it into use I find the “exception” that keeps it from being exactly what I want or need. Do you know what I mean? Take my planner for example. When I stumbled across it in the store, I thought, “hey, this one could work” It’s actually a “student” planner, so it runs from Aug 09- Jul 10… “okay, I can work with that” I thought… and I have so far (I’ll worry about what to do after Jul when the time comes). But soon after implementing it, reality set in. It’s largish about 8 1/2” x 5 1/2” which is not a bad size for a desktop planner, but proves a little impractical for carrying around with me unless I carry a really big purse (which sometimes I do, because, um, well, rabid sock knitter). That’s not actually the exception. The exception is an issue with my to do lists, last year I just used a smallish (easy to fit in any size purse) notebook and wrote out everything I could think of on a weekly list and marked things off or added to it as needed. This worked well because I had plenty of space to write and could carry over tasks when needed. I could also use two pages when necessary to list knitting projects on one and other stuff on the other. It gave me a good clear idea of things that I wanted to accomplish at a glance. The downside to that system was that I then needed a separate calendar. Thus, it was not perfect. So this year, I tried to “kill two birds with one stone” with the new planner. But… the little spaces on the weekly pages for each date don’t give me enough space to write everything down and there are no blank pages for the overview and master planning. Can you tell I used to be a Franklin Covey girl when I worked full time?

I actually still have the nice leather cover for my old planner and could buy the refills, but that’s sort of overkill for planning when to vacuum and what to knit, don’t you think? I think the thing weighs around 3 or 4 pounds when it’s got all the pages inside. (It used to lovingly be referred to as my “brain”)

Anyway, I digress. So my quest for a good system of tracking my day to day activities fell short of my needs. I’ve been struggling with how to overcome this issue and mostly losing. I often lose track of things I intended to do only to think of them much later and then I get frustrated with myself for being scatterbrained. I. Need. My. Lists!

I know there are electronic gadgets out there that can do some of that work and possibly in the future, that may be a solution for me, but until that is feasible, I guess I’ll continue the quest.

This isn’t isolated to planners and calendars. The same thing happens with purses, bags and other organization gadgets. I start out very hopeful and the thing seems so full of promise and then I discover the shortcoming. I sometimes wish I had more skills and all the right tools so that I could assemble all the right elements and develop perfectly customized things that would meet my needs and keep me exactly as organized as I want to be.

So maybe that explains in a very convoluted way exactly what happened when we tried to use a switch to connect my hubby's laptop to the internet yesterday.  It didn't work out like we thought it would. 

Anyway, Thanks for letting me ramble.

Happy Knitting!

Nana