Assorted plans, lists and reminders

BlogLily has kindly tagged me to write about planning. Although I have a reputation for being organised, at least among the people who knew me pre-2005, at this present time I am feeling distinctly disorganised and my planning skills are not very much in evidence. However, I will attempt to describe how I try to plan out my days. I can’t guarantee that the plans work, but that’s life.

For work, I use my diary for writing down appointments. They are highlighted in green. I used to have a colour coding system – green for recurring things which were normally on a rota, like when I was on the enquiries desk, and pink for unusual things likes meetings and driving lessons. Nowadays, I don’t work on the enquiries desk or the issue desk, except on an ad hoc basis and I my pink highlighter ran out, so everything is highlighted in green. I have just been given a new pink highlighter, so maybe I will start categorising things again.

Also at work, I make many, many lists. These might be in my diary, on post-it notes or on scraps of paper. Lists of things to do on particular days are written in the diary, unless they are particularly important, in which case they get written as a list on a scrap of paper or post-it and put somewhere I can’t miss it.

I also have a list of things that are ongoing in the background but which I don’t have to do right at this very moment. This is on an orange post-it note stuck into my diary. It is a dangerous list because the things on it are quite likely never to get done but having them on the list creates a false sense of security – they’re on the list, so that means, in some weird way that they’re actually getting done. This is probably only realistic in my mind.

Email is quite useful as a planning tool, in that you can (at least on our work email) flag emails and group them in order of urgency. So, I have, in descending order of urgency, red, orange and green flags.

I now have a new notebook for listing and planning particularly problematic tasks in detail, which is proving quite helpful so far.

As you can see, the way I plan is, in itself, not very organised and quite ’bitty’, which is a bit ironic I suppose. It works most of the time, until I lose one of my lists or forget to add something to a list or just don’t look a list for weeks on end and then realise that I should have done something last month. I don’t know whether I should put everything together on one enormous plan but that might make things seem more overwhelming than they actually are, so that probably isn’t a good idea.

Out of work, there are more lists and my phone is set to beep at times when I have to remember something particularly important, but I don’t keep a diary for things that aren’t to do with work. We do have a calendar, which is quite useful, as long as I remember to write the event on it.

I hope that no-one is disappointed with my lack of a lovely, written down plan like BlogLily’s or Helen’s (you can see Helen’s plan for her book in the header of her blog). I suppose I have something like the equivalent, but it’s just not all in one place.

I would have liked to take photographs of my diary, scraps of paper, etc., but they have people’s names and details on them, so I thought it might be best not to.