I was sitting at my desk today creating yet another to-do list on a vertical index card, the kind you have a hard time finding at the Staples, when I realized that making to-do lists for me had changed significantly over the last 25 years or so.
I remember the day I was high enough on the Merrill Lynch totem pole to warrant my own Franklin Planner. For a time, all managers received some cursory training in how to use their Franklin Planner and left with their very own. The brown pleather binder a symbol of your status within the company. No one of any significance ever showed up at a meeting without their planner. To do so was thumbing your nose at the establishment.
For those unfamiliar with said planner, let me explain. In its classic form, it is an odd-sized six-ring binder filled with pages the color of the old financial ledgers. There are two pages for each day. On the left side, a daily scheduler, denoted in 30 minute increments, flanked by a to-do list with a legend of how to use it (check mark for completed, dot for carried over, prioritized by A, B, or C respectively). Just below the to-do list, a small expense box for recording your daily monetary outlays. The facing page was merely a lined page cleverly labeled “Notes”, which as the title implied, was where you took notes.
Each day, to mirror the virtues of Benjamin Franklin, you were to create a unique to-do list, classifying everything accordingly, and review your time schedule and your notes. At the end of each month, you were to create an index of where everything was and retire the month to the storage binder, to be replaced by the month 30 days hence. Thus you carried two months with you at all time - the current month and the next. And you re-created the to-do list every day. And you manually tracked your appointments. And you took notes on a page that was, truth be told, to narrowly lined to be of any use at all.
And then came the electronic day planner and there went the cache of the Franklin Planner. At least at Merrill Lynch. Blackberries became the new status symbol, and only those of us on the slower track still carried a day planner. I eventually ditched the ledger-green for a more fancy package (Monticello, with blue trim) and then tried the compact version, but eventually I was won over by electronics and now my calendar is maintained on Google and available on my laptop, my desktop, my phone and who the hell knows where else.
And I am on time for my appointments and I have a slew of phone numbers with me at all times - most of which I’d never call anyway. And I have yet to find a good way to create a to-do list. Because for all the inefficiencies of the Franklin Planner, the idea of a to-do list, written by your own hand, and recreated each day was, by far, the most valuable part of the planner. Because it reminded you, daily, of all the things you kept putting off. And putting off. And, you had the inherent pleasure of drawing a line through the menial tasks you completed each day.
Since the abandonment of my beloved planner, I have tried everything. Legal pads. Little legal pads. Pads inside little vinyl folders. Index cards. Vertical index cards. Pads labeled “To Do.” The “tasks” app on Google Calendar. Evernote. Something else electronic that I can’t remember now. And with all of these, I find that nothing - and I mean nothing - is ever going to be as efficient as my Franklin Planner To-Do list.
It’s not as though I forget about doing things now. I do a pretty good job, given the hodge-podge of reminders I carry with me. It’s just that now, for me at least, maintaining a decent to-do list is work, where before it was habit. And given that I’m trying my damndest to establish good habits, I lament the fact that no matter what I’ve tried, the habit of maintaining a to-do list has been lost for me.
But undaunted, I keep trying. Or looking for the next big (or small) thing. I’m open to suggestions.
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