An Aid For The Disorganizationally Proficient (Issue #144)

I’ve written before about my disorganizational skills. (Always try to put a positive spin on things!) Many of you will recall the results of a personality test I took in university wherein my organizational ability was deemed to rank in the 4th percentile. This meant 96% of the population was epter than I at that sort of thing. The professor administering the study said it was the lowest mark he’d seen. Of course at that time, the early 70s, he’d only seen a few thousand.

My main compensatory mechanism over the decades has been writing myself notes. Naturally, for the disorganizationally-adept, the drawback to this was keeping track of them. One notebook certainly wasn’t sufficient because it could be misplaced so easily. So I bought a backup. And a backup to the backup. And so on, until my desk could not handle the overflow and I had notebooks on my night stand, bathroom and kitchen counters, car, and jammed between the cushion and the armrest of my Comfy Chair.

Undoubtedly, those 96 percenters would have notebooks for specific things: one for phone numbers and addresses: another for writing ideas: a third for scheduling-type stuff and another for video game codes and tips. Probably they’d remember where they put each and every one of them too. I try not to hate those people. It can take me an hour and hundreds of flipped pages in multiple notebooks before I can find somebody’s phone number.

Ditto for writing ideas. Usually I’d just jot down a few keywords to get me kickstarted when I had the time and energy to write. So, scattered amongst the phone numbers and directions and reminders to fetch my kids from somewhere were phrases like “women - haha!” and “fishing = sacrament.”

It was difficult to get any writing done because while searching through the books for a half-remembered topic any number of distractions could, and usually would, get me sidetracked.

Well, technology, in the form of Mother Google’s homepage add-ons (one day Google will try to eat Microsoft, or vice versa, and the whole world will choke to death) has arrived to save the day.

What’s ironic is that this hi-tech idea which has already saved me countless hours of page-flipping is based on such a low-tech invention.

It’s a virtual yellow sticky note. And it’s way better than the originals because it doesn’t curl up and drift away like an autumn-tossed leaf that then disappears amongst desk debris. It’s in the middle of my homepage and I can add notes any time I please. I can also delete them when they’re no longer relevant. When I first got it, I just typed random things and deleted them because it was fun.

My only concern is regarding its storage capacity. Since it remains on my monitor screen I suspect there’s a finite number of things I can add before the thing gets filled up. I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks now and it’s filled a goodly portion of my screen. I’m definitely adding things faster than I am deleting them.

I suppose I could buy a backup computer....