I don’t know how it is for other perfectionists, but I’m what you might call a productivity geek. Since before I even knew what the word “productivity” meant. At ten years old I was already in love with the back-to-school sales; I derived huge amounts of pleasure from running my hands along all those neat stacks of notebooks, ring binders and filler paper, which were just crying out to be organized.

I’m basically in love with systems. Give me raw data and tell me how you want it organized, and I’ll create a spreadsheet for it. Show me a room full of stuff that needs to be sorted through and prioritized, and let me loose. Keep me stocked with hanging files, manila folders, labels and a color printer, and I’m a happy puppy.

So what’s bad here? Nothing at all—as long as I have the time and energy to keep up with the sheer volume of stuff that lands in my life, needing to be organized and productivized. And I almost never do. The will to handle such things tends to come in waves—I’ll find myself riding a wave of get-organized energy, and I’ll spend anywhere from a handful of hours to several days setting up new systems to keep me streamlined and productive and efficient.

Rather than simply using the systems I set up during my last surge of energy.

I think this is because I want all my systems to be perfect. With a contingency plan for every possible input, so that once things are set up and running, I’ll never have to think about them again, upkeep of the system will be minimal, and nothing will ever slip through the cracks on me again.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

There just isn’t enough time in my days to keep everything as together as I think I “should.” And even when I find (or make) pockets of deal-with-it time, I often don’t have the energy for doing whatever tasks I’ve assigned to myself. And my self-esteem slips another notch. And my to-do piles grow.

So I’m super-excited to be taking an e-course with Cairene MacDonald of Third Hand Works, starting this Monday. It’s called “The True Discipline of Time Management,” although I suspect that it will include lots of good information on stuff management, too.

I participated in one of Cairene’s free telecalls a couple of months ago, and she impressed me enormously with her calmness, confidence, and clarity. She has a knack for systems which I envy tremendously, and I’m really looking forward to learning from her.

NOTE: Darn. I was going to make the name of the class above an active link, but I just checked back and it looks like registration is closed for this time around. The course will, Cairene says, be offered again in the fall of this year. Despite that, Third Hand Works offers a wealth of additional information which you might want to check out, plus Cairene is starting another, different course on June 1 called “The Organic Business Manual.” This was the subject of the telecall I listened to, and the information in that was so helpful I can’t even imagine how amazing the entire course will be.

In the meantime, I’ve gone back to keeping things simple. Each day I jot down things to do as they occur to me on the fly, either in a small spiral notebook (if I know I won’t get to it today) or on a sticky note (if I think I will). A sticky note is unintimidating, and I don’t have to worry about making it look nice. Another cool thing I discovered not long ago is the PocketMod, which I use sometimes, too.

I’ve decided that pretty systems and tools are nice, but workable ones are even better.

Although I’ll probably never stop desiring and trying to find (or invent) a combination of the two.

Tags: lists, systems

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