Tag Archives: Organisation

A Time to Panic

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Life passes slowly, when epic things lie ahead.

I have two full days ahead of me as a “free” man, before I am to be mar­ried to the only woman crazy enough to have me. And, nat­u­rally, I am pan­ick­ing so much that by Fri­day morn­ing I expect to have exploded in a shower of caf­feine and mis­cel­la­neous body parts.

I’m sure at this point I’m sup­posed to be ner­vous about my choice of wife; that I’d picked the wrong woman and was doom­ing myself to a life of unhap­pi­ness. Or some­thing. But the time for wor­ry­ing about that was a very long time ago.

Eric, Joseph and I

About this long ago.

No, this panic is merely a result of hav­ing to organ­ise the biggest thing I have ever organ­ised (by about a fac­tor of 4, in terms of peo­ple, or a fac­tor of 400 in terms of the pre­cip­i­tous fall in my bank bal­ance). The ser­vice is organ­ised, though we sent out 30 invites with the wrong time. The recep­tion is organ­ised, though if it rains we’ll be an hour early. The DJs haven’t replied since I told them “no soppy crap and no 90s boy bands”. Flow­ers might hap­pen at some point, and the cake maker hasn’t been in con­tact for weeks.

Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Talk are all abuzz with peo­ple ask­ing ques­tions; where they should be and when, what to buy, what to bring. The morn­ing of the wed­ding is shap­ing up to be a bizarre and con­vo­luted guest-shuffling exercise.

A wed­ding appears to be not so much about love, as spend­ing pots of cash on a great big party and going mad try­ing to make it all hap­pen. And how­ever it hap­pens, in the end, we’ll love each other just as much after­wards as before.

Eric and I

But maybe we’ll be peo­ple again, not insanely vibrat­ing beings hewn from raw ele­men­tal stress.

Inbox Many

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There’s been a recent increase in productivity-related posts on Life­hacker, so inspired by that I thought I’d share how I “get things done”, and hope­fully swap tips with others!

My approach is sim­ple: I attempt “Inbox Zero”. And delib­er­ately fail.

After sev­eral years of attempt­ing to keep a clean inbox, hav­ing any mes­sages at all sit­ting there really annoys me.  I use that to my advan­tage and end up doing the polar oppo­site of “Inbox Zero” — that is, I use my inbox as my to-do list.  When­ever I think of some­thing I need to do, I write a short e-mail, usu­ally just a sub­ject line, and send it to what­ever inbox is appro­pri­ate for the task (work or home).

It has the advan­tage of sim­plic­ity — while cor­po­rate fire­walls could pre­vent me from using a todo.txt and a filo­fax could be left at home, there’s vir­tu­ally no sit­u­a­tion when I’m more than a few feet from a device that can do e-mail.

And the worry that “Inbox Zero” was designed to address — huge inboxes that get piled up with junk that never gets acted on — is avoided because hav­ing those e-mails in my inbox, even though I put them there, is annoy­ing enough that I clear them as soon as possible.

I’ve taken to call­ing the tech­nique “Inbox Many”.

So, great untamed hordes of the inter­net — I’m intrigued. How do you lot get things done?

Failure to Organise

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My par­ents were, if noth­ing else, organ­ised at all times. I don’t recall at any point real­is­ing that they had no idea what was going on, or that they weren’t absolutely in charge of what we did. In con­trast, Eric and I mud­dle through day-to-day, just about keep­ing it together — some­times we for­get to brush Joseph’s teeth, or can’t be both­ered to wash up, or leave the laun­dry sit­ting in the wash­ing machine for a bit too long.

Which is why the fact that Joseph is start­ing pre-school next week is all the more scary. We’re used to a life where, assum­ing it’s not a work day, what we do just doesn’t mat­ter. If Joseph doesn’t wake up until 9am, no prob­lem! If we can’t be both­ered to get dressed before lunchtime, nobody cares!

But as of next week, Joseph has to be places. Reg­u­larly, on time, washed and break­fasted and bussed across town by the same time, three days a week. And picked up at a cer­tain time, no mat­ter what else might be hap­pen­ing. It’s a wee bit scary.

I won­der if hav­ing a school-age child will sud­denly grant us pow­ers of organ­i­sa­tion — but I doubt it. I once hoped that hav­ing a child at all would do that, and clearly it hasn’t.

Hope­fully being a dis­or­gan­ised par­ent is okay, because I don’t seem likely to turn into my par­ents any­time soon.