I'm in trouble. Again. I promised to do something for my Ever Patient Partner in Life. A small thing. Not life changing. Not earth shattering. Not the kind of promise that gets etched into wedding vows or carved into stone tablets. Just a small simple thing.
D. K. Wall:But I promised. And this is the part that makes the whole situation more tragic than it needs to be, I wrote it down. Own a to do list specifically so I wouldn't forget.
D. K. Wall:I don't think I'm shocking you by saying I forgot. How you ask could I possibly forget something that was clearly written on a to do list?
D. K. Wall:Well, that requires a small but critical additional step. I had to actually look at the to do list. Maybe what I need is a reminder to check my to do list. And then presumably a reminder to check the reminder.
D. K. Wall:I have had this problem since forever. I can still feel the cold dread of sitting in a grade school classroom when a teacher cheerfully says, okay, everyone, pass your homework forward. And realizing in that exact moment that I possessed no homework to pass.
D. K. Wall:There wasn't even the memory of homework. The homework existed in some parallel universe where responsible me lived and responsible me had clearly missed the bus that morning.
D. K. Wall:In college, the reminder usually arrived in the form of a fraternity brother stumbling up to me, still bleary eyed from whatever misadventure had happened the night before, asking with sincere academic concern. Hey, did you think that assignment was hard? Assignment? What assignment? The one that's due today?
D. K. Wall:So when I hit the working world, I knew I had to get organized like an adult. A real functioning employable adult. I bought a day timer. For you youngsters out there, a day timer was an actual paper book. Each day had your schedule on one page and your to do list on the other.
D. K. Wall:In the back lived your contacts, complete with phone numbers to their office, mind you, where a receptionist or secretary would answer, take down your message on a small pink slip of paper, and hand it to the recipient when they returned, who would then call you back, reach your receptionist, who would write down a message on your pink slip of paper, and on it went.
D. K. Wall:Telephone tag could take days, sometimes weeks, occasionally entire careers. I probably still owe someone a return call, which is precisely why we needed a to do list.
D. K. Wall:Return Bob's call from eight days ago. He said it was important. Bob, by the time we actually talked, probably couldn't remember why he had called unless he had written it down on his to do list.
D. K. Wall:So, I carried my day timer everywhere. Well, on the days I remembered it, which was in fairness at least some days. Usually accompanied by a sad little wad of pink slips fluttering out of it like confetti at a parade no one wants to attend. Calls I needed to return, but hadn't yet added to my ever growing to do list.
D. K. Wall:Then one day, everything changed. A computer appeared on my desk. An actual computer with an actual email address and a program right there on the screen for my calendar and glory of glories, my to do list.
D. K. Wall:It worked great. I could put everything on the list. It only took roughly twice as long as writing it down in the day timer would have, but it was digital, which made it inherently superior. At least that's what everyone claimed. A fact I was certain of right up until the program crashed and wiped everything out.
D. K. Wall:Slowly though, technology improved. More stable, more reliable, and that wonderful convenience of email and online calendars quickly became a different kind of nightmare.
D. K. Wall:No more luxurious days of phone tag before scheduling a meeting. Now other people could just slap an appointment onto your calendar like they were posting flyers on a telephone pole. My to do list eventually included a recurring item. Schedule fake meetings weeks out so calendar looks too full for actual meetings.
D. K. Wall:At some point, we all carried BlackBerrys. The official corporate calendar and task list was Microsoft Outlook, which didn't actually run on BlackBerrys. We were to interface with it, which is IT speak for good luck.
D. K. Wall:I found myself scribbling to do's on a notepad. I had a giant whiteboard in my office tracking projects. It worked beautifully. Right up until I left the office with my handy and somewhat useless Blackberry.
D. K. Wall:And then of course came the iPhone, which solved everything and nothing. Mostly, I could take a picture of my whiteboard and carry it with me so I could pull it out, scroll through the eleventy-seven bazillion photos of my dogs, and remember what I was supposed to be doing rather than looking at photos of my dogs.
D. K. Wall:Eventually, mercifully, I left the corporate world. Life became simpler. Supposedly.
D. K. Wall:I still needed to keep track of my to do's. I tried every computer program known to man. Hated them all. Some were too simple. Some too complicated. Some required a graduate level certification just to add a task such as buy milk.
D. K. Wall:Until I circled all the way back to pen and paper. A Bullet Journal. How simple? How quaint? How effective?
D. K. Wall:Well, effective at least for what I need to do today. I never quite mastered tracking long term projects in it. Like say writing a novel, which is my main source of putting food on the table, a modestly important enterprise.
D. K. Wall:So, I track some things on the computer. After much trial and error, I have mostly settled on Obsidian. It's powerful. It's flexible. It's great. And I'll probably be using something else a year from now.
D. K. Wall:Though, sometimes I scribble a note on a notepad to remind me to enter something into Obsidian. And sometimes I write a post it to remind me about the notepad. And sometimes, the post it ends up stuck to the back of a coffee cup that's traveled to the kitchen where it has begun a new life as a coaster.
D. K. Wall:So somewhere out there on a notepad, a post it, a bullet journal, an Obsidian file, possibly the back of a receipt from a hardware store I visited in March is a note to do something for my ever patient partner in life. Unfortunately, I have no idea where.
D. K. Wall:What I clearly need to do is get everything organized. One unified system. One source of truth. A clean sleek foolproof method that ensures nothing, not a single small promise to the most important person in my life ever slips through the cracks again.
D. K. Wall:I'll do that. Absolutely. I will get organized. Just let me add that to my to do list.