Angie Lewis, mother of four under 5, leaves little to chance in the chaos department. She knows the odds are against her.
So, staying up late each night, she maps out her battle plan, finally toddling off to sleep knowing she’s got it all down–on paper, at least.
There’s the master calendar in the kitchen, color-coded by using the initial of each child’s first name (Ryan, red; Grant, green–you get the picture). She checks that, oh, five times a day, making sure she has everyone in the right place at the right time.
Then there’s the Franklin Planner that never leaves her side; she gets all the nitty-gritty into that Bible of the Day Divided into Quarter-Hour Chunks. And finally there are the sticky notes she scatters like feathers all over her nest–beside the sink, beneath her purse–roughly 6 to 10 notes a day, just to make sure she doesn’t forget to, say, start the dishwasher after lunch.
“I’m obsessed about forgetting,” says Lewis, a preschool teacher from Chicago’s Northwest Side.
Talk to a busy person lately? Chances are, whether they confess it or not, they are clutching white-knuckled to that cache of papers they would, if they dared to reveal all their secrets, refer to as “my lifeline,” “my sanity,” “the thing that keeps me from jumping off the bridge.”
We have become a nation obsessed with keeping track of what we need to do, when we need to do it and where we need to be.
It is not good enough anymore for most of us to scribble a little this or a little that onto the calendar blithely hanging by the phone. There are calendars in triplicate in some lives, and color-coding is no longer reserved for the most compulsive among us. It’s nothing novel to have a hand-held computerized doodad that shrieks and whistles when it’s time to pick up little Missy at the bus stop.
Connie Sivesind, mother of three in Crystal Lake, faces the start of another week by doing the sanest thing she can think of: She retires to her bed on Sunday nights with a glass of wine, a bottle of nail polish and the surest balm in her book: her calendar.
“I do my toes and look at the calendar,” she says, as if it’s the most natural relaxant in the world. “You only have to miss one important thing once–and the way you feel and how devastated your kid is because you didn’t bring something or you weren’t there–and then on you just take the time to make sure it’s all on the calendar.”
As the chaos of our lives comes banging at our doors, we hold it at bay, or so we pretend, by grabbing pencils and ticking off the litany of things to do. “I have a list,” we seem to think, “therefore I am in control.”
“There’s something about crossing off,” says Carolyn Geldermann, a mother of four in Lake Forest who now wields a Palm Pilot as she darts from drop-off to drop-off. “I put things on my list just to cross it off.”
She is hardly alone.
Consider the numbers: Since that little wonder called the Palm Pilot, a hand-held computerized log of your life known in the industry as a PDA, or “personal digital assistant,” was launched in 1996, more than 5 million have been sold. Each year Americans spend billions on planners, date books, calendars, software and various hand-held devices, all aiming to harness the havoc of modern-day family life.
There’s even a National Association of Professional Organizers, folks who get paid to bulldoze the cobwebbed piles out of our lives. Founded in 1985 by a handful of Los Angeles list-making types, the ranks now number more than 1,250.
We might stay up late, making lists on the backs of envelopes, jotting things to do on paper napkins, but somehow it’s not all getting done.
A full 83 percent of Americans want to be more organized, but only 52 percent use a tool to do that, according to a recent survey by time managers at Franklin Covey in Salt Lake City, the folks who sell Franklin Planners by the millions each year and spread the gospel according to Stephen Covey, company co-chair and author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”
Meet Stephanie Winston, best-selling author of “Getting Organized” and a whole shelf of variations on that theme. She has been in the business of organizing lives for the last quarter century, the first professional organizer, she claims, calling herself the Martha Stewart of Organizing.
Making lists, she says, is nothing new. “My mother made lists. What has changed is the sense of chaos.” Particularly in the last five to seven years, she says, ever since the corporate downsizing of the early ’90s, when middle managers found themselves shouldering more responsibilities with fewer clerical supports. Add to that all the working women who bear the brunt of home responsibilities, and you’ve got a nation scrambling to scribble lists.
Winston calls her calendar her lifeline; “it’s the rope I use to pull myself along as I go through the week,” she says. “Because so much of life is out of control, those elements that can be brought under control should be.”
She advocates a simple system: a master to-do list that’s a catch basin for every fleeting thought of something that needs to be done, a carry-along calendar–not one for work and one for home but rather “a single unified calendar that becomes your personal compass”–and, finally, plenty of what she calls “yellow stickies,” those paper squares that you can stick wherever you need a reminder: on the dashboard, the bathroom mirror or even the top of the washing machine.
That some of us have come to believe we cannot face the dawn without a scribbled list in hand just might make you giggle when you hear social psychologists compare the behavior to laboratory research done on rats in cages with electric shocks zapped randomly through grids under their little rat paws.
Karen Cates, a social psychologist who teaches at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, explains: “It’s called `learned helplessness,’ and it’s this whole body of research that looks at why some people give up in the challenge of adversity and others don’t.”
As is often the case in these human queries, the scientists put the rat to the test. One rat got a cage with a shelf; the other got a cage without. Random electrical shocks were sent through grids on the cage floors, causing the rats to jump. The rat with the shelf soon learned that if he stayed near the shelf he could jump onto it until the shocks subsided. He managed to lead a happy rat life, chowing down on his rat pellets, relatively unbothered by the shocks.
The other rat, the one without a shelf upon which to seek refuge, could do nothing but jump, jump, jump whenever the shocks surged. That rat despaired. He stopped eating.
Kates likens us with our lists to the rat with the shelf. “Maybe we can’t control the overwhelming amount of work in a day, but we can use our shelf–our Palm Pilots, our color-coded calendar–as a way for us to feel like we’re in control even if we’re not.”
Yet another research type, this one a professor of marketing at Western Michigan University named Jay Lindquist, has extensively studied time management styles, and he divides us into two camps: monochrons and polychrons.
Monochrons are folks who like to do one thing at a time; polychrons like to juggle many things at the same time. Monochrons love lists, monochrons love the TV Guide, following the grid to the show of their choice. Franklin Planners are custom-made for monochrons, who strive to be in control by compulsively filling in every little square, says Lindquist.
Polychrons detest lists, polychrons grab for the channel changer and switch from show to show. Polychrons thrive on what may seem like chaos to a monochron, but they, too, are in control, he says. (There is no gender split, adds Lindquist, debunking the myth that women were born able to handle 15 things at once.)
Unfortunately, no one has done any studies to prove that all this listmaking is making a dent in the chaos around us. But it sure makes us feel better.
Unless you count yourself among the listless.
As does Ned Reece. “I’m hopeless, I am organizationally challenged,” says the commercial real estate broker and father of two who lives on Chicago’s North Side. “I do only the thing that’s red hot. And if it doesn’t get done, the whole castle is gonna fall down.
“Here’s the real issue: I’m too smart for lists. I can keep it all in my brain. Only when it reaches critical mass, which comes increasingly in my advancing age, then it’s gonna spill onto a list.”
If he gets through the day without a list, he considers it a red-letter day. If it all falls apart and he succumbs to a list, he stamps himself a failure. About three to five times a quarter, he figures, he gets to the point where he has to make a list.
“Then I go bing, bing, bing and I get it all done. And then I say, `See, I don’t need a list.'”
TWO TODDLERS AND AN ORGANIZED HOUSE
Name: Laura Ashman
Age: 37
Family: Husband, Brad, a contractor; two kids, Michael, 3 , Tommy, 2. Both “really busy boys.” They live in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood.
Job: Professional organizer, as in she gets paid to turn other people’s chaos into calm. “I’m there somewhat as a trainer, a coach, a therapist, a business adviser,” Ashman says.
Name of Company: Home & Office CPR: Clutter Problems Resolved.
Past life: Media and advertising executive.
She can’t help it: “People used to tease me because my socks were organized like a rainbow, from light to darker.”
When she realized she could devote her life to her cause: A friend from high school was opening a store outside Detroit, so Ashman and two other friends flew up for the weekend. When they got there the place was nowhere near ready. The friends pitched in, gave the toughest job to Ashman, and of course she whipped everything into perfect order. Driving back to the airport, the friends insisted: “You know, Laura, you really should be doing that for a living.” Once home, after adjusting to her recent new motherhood, she decided to take a crack at it part time.
What drives her: “I need to know things aren’t falling through the cracks. If things aren’t organized they could be falling through the cracks.”
Credo No. 1: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
Credo No. 2: “Pack it away, put it away, give it away or throw it away.”
Life before kids: “I used to have the time to fold and make everything pretty. The inside of my cabinets used to be as pretty as the outside.”
Life after kids, understatement of the year: “Your life is no longer an exact science.”
What her close friends say about her: “I never see you as happy as when you’re checking things off your list.”
The one thing she couldn’t survive without: Her nerve center, that is, a desk in the kitchen where she keeps her files and her calendars (she has one just for birthdays, one for all kinds of kid-friendly events/seasonal ideas and one filled with to-do lists and appointments that she carries everywhere she goes). At the front of the files she has a laminated list of important phone numbers for babysitters, right where they’d think to grab it. Underneath the desk, she keeps her camcorder (“if it’s not out you won’t use it”), a black box filled with articles and pamphlets on places to go with kids and a stack of things that need to be returned, so they’re right there when she’s heading out the door.
How organized is she: Once a month she actually updates her scrapbook, rotates toys so her kids don’t get tired of the old stuff and fills in the next month of kid-friendly activities on her calendar so on any given day she or a babysitter can look at the page and get a load of ideas for places to go, things to do.
The most touching part of her super-organizing skills: Stacked on her closet shelf, beautifully folded, of course, the very clothes she was wearing the moment she met her husband.
The one place she gave up on: The pantry. Although you couldn’t tell from looking at it, Ashman says she had to surrender her old system of having the things most frequently used closest at hand. She had to move cereal boxes and pasta up high; the baby was always walking around the house eating uncooked spaghetti. Now she has barbecue sauce bottles stacked on that shelf; the kids leave the sauce alone.
The one place in her house where clutter reigns (just to make you feel better): Sorry, there isn’t one.
What she says about clearing chaos out of other people’s lives: “Oh my God, I found my calling.”
— Barbara Mahany
THE SECRET IS TO MASTER THE LIST
All right, all right, the No. 1 thing on your to-do list is to get organized. Hmmm. How the heck do you do that? Well, the No. 2 thing on your list had better be to turn to that guru of getting organized, Stephanie Winston, author of “Getting Organized.”
All you need for this experiment is one big wall calendar, one datebook to carry with you, a spiral notebook to leave at home and an endless supply of what Winston calls “yellow stickies.”
Don’t think of getting organized until you have a big calendar, or a chalk board, hanging in the kitchen. Make sure everybody’s activities are marked.
Now, make sure you record everything on the family calendar into your personal calendar. On your personal calendar, says Winston, you list all appointments, all family activities, any errands and follow-ups.
Winston preaches what she calls a two-list time management system, which is a master list and a daily list.
In something as simple as a spiral notebook, write down everything you need to get done as you think of it–that’s the master list.
“This is one of the most powerful organizational tools that exists,” writes Winston. She calls the master list, “a kind of warehouse out of which you move a certain number of manageable tasks each day onto your Daily List.”
The Daily List she calls “your daily guide to action.” Here’s where the yellow stickies come in. Go over the master list to decide what you want to put on your daily list, and what needs to be done that day. Write that on a yellow stickie, and slap it into your personal calendar for the day.
Because she left her personal calendar in a taxi last summer, never to be seen again, Winston now has a system to minimize the damage. Every month, she photocopies the upcoming month in her datebook so at least she has a record of all her appointments.
Oh, by the way, you can cross No. 2 off your list now.
— Barbara Mahany
