Out to Lunch
Getting Organize D
By Virginia Grant Clammer
A New Yorker cartoon depicts Superman, now balding and paunchy, standing poised at an open window. Just before take off, he turns to his middle-aged wife and asks: “Dang! Now where was I going?”
If you have ever stood in your kitchen wondering: “Now, why am I here?” and the question is not an existential one, the foregoing cartoon may resonate with you. And this article, which is about how to avoid such moments of forgetfulness, may provide some strategies to stay focused in your personal life.
As a learning specialist, I know about loss of focus, memory, and organization. I work with children and adults with learning interferences, like dyslexia, ADD, and the most recent in-vogue disorder, “executive functioning deficit,” a very real gap that affects one’s organizational skills, almost as if the executive secretary who should be keeping the brain organized has gone out to lunch.
Once I turned 60, my own executive secretary went on a permanent break, and I had to rely heavily on the advice I’d been giving to my clients. And so, to prepare for this article, I have thought about my own sense of loss over failing memory, and the strategies I use to circumvent it. I have surveyed my clients and other adults with learning differences as well as friends and colleagues who, like me, are confronted daily with ”Dang!” moments, and I have reviewed literature on the subject of organization, including the recent plethora of articles and books for all people who are swamped with information, not just us boomers. (See Newsweek, “Attack of the Organizers,” March 19, 2007, and New York Times, “Slow Down a Second, Brave Multitaskers,” March 25, 2007.) It’s no coincidence that magazines like Simple, places like The Container Store, seminars in time management, and classes on yoga and meditation are flourishing. Life is getting more complicated. And as we get older it’s harder to juggle family, career, aging parents, and social engagements. Like the wrinkled elephant covered with Post-its, who says, in another New Yorker cartoon: “I find I am relying more and more on these,” we have to find ways to compensate.
Since organization is always a personal matter, you should tailor the following suggestions to fit your own life, especially with the very first suggestion, which is:
Get a personal planner or organizer. Whether you want a hard-copy planner that zips up all of life’s loose scraps or a Blackberry or another electronic device, you need one place for addresses, phone numbers, dates, and important notes. Every piece of information jotted on random pieces of paper (telephone numbers or a recommended restaurant) needs on a daily basis to be recorded in this planner, with all relevant information, like the date, time, and address of an appointment, names of people you’ll encounter, etc. In my address book I go so far as to annotate all the connections I need for each person (even step-children, job information, etc.) to avoid those embarrassing moments when I call a friend and get the spouse whose name I cannot recall.
Find a system for keeping track of telephone and e-mail messages. We’ve all come across scraps of paper with telephone numbers and cryptic notes: “IMPT! Call J. ASAP!” — J. who? Important, why? Keep a pencil and pad or Post-its by every phone in your house. Take complete notes for each call. Transfer numbers, appointments, and responsibilities to your general planner (date book, palm pilot) right away, and don’t tear off sheets of paper from the telephone notepads until you’ve acted on or recorded them. Same goes for e-mail. Process any message that can be dealt with in under a minute, then store the rest.
Keep lists. And as above, do not tear off stray pages to tuck into a purse or pocket.
Transfer the important info to a planner or a separate master “to do” list, one that includes both short- term errands and long-term goals, and even random thoughts. When life gets complicated, the master list can be sectioned into categories. Major projects like a home renovation, of course, need their own file.
Keep a notepad by your bed for those middle-of-the-night flashes (hot or otherwise), when you suddenly remember to send a birthday card to your sister or you have an inspiration for a project. And keep another pad in the kitchen (magnetized on the refrigerator door?) for grocery items and menu planning. Skinny portable notepads that can fit into a jeans pocket are great for traveling — as long as every important item is eventually transferred to your main planner.
Create a filing system that works for you. Some people like all hard copy; some all electronic; most of us are somewhere between the two. (The rule of thumb is the younger you are, the less you print. I print out a lot of hard copy. I have great empathy for my computer. What if, like me, it runs out of memory?) For hard copy, color-coded files help you access information quickly: green for financial info, purple for health, red for items needing immediate attention, etc. Sort these regularly, and for electronic files, do a daily or weekly cleanup.
A lot of boomers have to keep track of parental health and financial information. One friend keeps all but emergency numbers at his mother’s house; another has a portable file that goes between his and his parents’ home. Of course there is always the technique of turning the whole mess over to your sibling. (See “Share the world” below.)
Once you have your own life organized, don’t keep the planning secret. If you still have children at home or a partner, have a centrally located calendar for annotating dates that affect everyone in your home.
Have a place for everything and have everything in its place. These were my mother’s words. Yes, Virginia, we do turn into our parents. Since life entails not just sitting by a telephone or a computer annotating events, we need to have a way to get out to the events with possessions, including planner, intact. Women have always envied men’s pockets and their system for what goes where, but women don’t need ten years of therapy discussing pocket envy; they need a purse or backpack or briefcase with lots of compartments. One colleague has three large purses, identical in all but color, with compartments for keys, wallet, subway card, cell phone, make up, planner, pens, and all the flotsam and jetsam of daily life. Whatever bag she chooses to wear with her outfit, her possessions are all in the same place, right down to her tip money for the coat-check person.
Worry about misplacing keys is a potent problem for both men and women. Many have a spot — a dish or a hook — by the front door where they drop their keys upon entering and pick them up upon leaving (with one or two sets of spare keys stashed away as a safety net). Some people like to drop all their metal — their keys and electronic equipment — as they come in the door, much the way gunslingers in old Westerns would lay their guns down on the bar. I drop my backpack, which has a giant hook to which I attach my keys, cell phone, and wallet. (When I misplace my bag, I can call my cell phone.)
Think about “a place for everything” this way: As you wander around the house looking for the hairbrush you laid down somewhere, remember that most people never misplace their toothbrush. It’s always in the bathroom cabinet in a cup. As a notorious mis-placer, I’ve put in each room a container I call the “black hole,” which I can mindlessly drop items into. Five rooms … five black holes. It narrows down the search. And when I find myself “Oh, no, at the black hole again!” I am shamed into putting the item where it belongs. Sometimes.
Last, there’s the problem of keeping track of all of the information that comes our way. How can we find a way to remember what’s important? The book we loved or the play we saw? Some people solidify memories by talking. But don’t do this: “I saw this great play … what’s it called … the one by the English writer, you know, what’s his name.” The “whachamacallit” is a dead giveaway. I’m terrified of being like the Edith Wharton character whose mind was like “a transient hotel, where facts came and went like transient lodgers without leaving their address behind.” I want my visitors to sign in. It helps me to write down what I want to remember and to use memory tricks, like mnemonics, for the hard stuff. The Sunnis and the Shiites, for instance. How could I ever get them straight? Well, the “ii” in Shiite stands for Iraq and Iran, which are predominantly Shiite; the rest of the Middle Eastern countries are predominantly Sunni, except for Lebanon, which is … never mind. I’m tempted to do what one couple did. They decided to share the world. Each partner then had to only to worry about half the world. I, personally, would give up the Middle East, the -stans, and any country with an x, y, or z in its name. Perhaps a world studies group, like a book group, that met regularly would reduce the load even more.
Seriously, the real point here is that, more than any other technique, we do have to simplify in order to manage the complex.
There is a story about a South American tribe that went on a long march, day after day. Then, all of a sudden, apparently for no reason, they would stop walking, sit down to rest for a while, and make camp for a couple of days before going any farther. They explained that they needed the time of rest so that their souls could catch up with them. More and more of us are relying on yoga, meditation, visualization, or other centering techniques to help “stay in the moment” and “let our souls catch up.”
As for what to do when you find yourself in the kitchen not remembering why you are there, a) You don’t have Alzheimer’s unless you don’t recognize that it is a kitchen, b) You can try walking back to where you came from, which usually jogs the memory, and c) You should go do something else. If what you wanted was important, you’ll get to it later.
Virginia Grant Clammer is a learning specialist in Manhattan, a political activist, a writer, and a grandmother, with strings tied on every finger.
