Coffee Break with Liz and Kate

So I found myself in an office supply store, recently, looking for the perfect pages for my planner. Again. Because that’s what I do every year after Christmas.

Sometimes, I wonder why I put myself through it. Because, quite frankly, there is no perfect planner out there.

Oh, sure, I’m a big fan of Franklin Covey, but at the beginning of every year, no matter how many planners I look at, I still come away somehow unsatisfied.

I know I’m not alone, based on the number of customers in the store, in the same aisle, staring at the same planners, and reacting as I was:

Pick one up, look through it. Put it down, pick up another one.

And so it continued. Not only at one office supply store, but at every one I visited over the course of a couple of weeks. I suspect I wasn’t the only one who left empty-handed. Ok – so I watched everyone else, and know I wasn’t the only one.

I think the main problem with these yearly planners is that we secretly count on them to do much more than keep track of our appointments and to-do lists.

We tend to look at these planners as a cure-all.

We wonder which planner will make our lives better. Which one will actually improve our quality of life.

We wonder which one will represent total transformation – turning the unorganized into the organized, or the less-than-successful into the total successes.

We ponder what format serves us best – daily? weekly? monthly?

At store 7, I turned to look at one of the guys who’d been in that aisle before I arrived and I asked him:

“Why is this so difficult?” Nothing like a rhetorical question. Especially when the questioned drew a blank equal to that of his questioner.

“I don’t know,” he’d said. “All I know is I have 15 minutes to make this decision, and wish I had all day.”

It occurred to me that perhaps I should employ his technique and put a time limit on my decision.

I came back to my senses in relatively short order, though. Because somewhere out there are planning pages with my name on them. And when I find them, this year, I may take things one step further and actually write on them.

-Liz

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