My Filofax and Me

My Filofax and Me – a Story of love, hatred and eventual understanding

Turning to the new week in my Filofax the other day, there was an advert inserted which told me that the new pages for the year 2011 would now be on sale.  This filled me with a somewhat disproportionate amount of dread.  And it’s not because of the usual reasons you might expect – I’m not going to start going on about how fast the years are going, or the fact that it is ridiculous that everyone is in such a rush that Christmas decorations were in the shops in October (although it is, of course).

No, this upset me because I know – I know – that I will not go out and buy the new set of diary pages.  I’ll never get round to it, and do you know why – here’s the problem – it’s because I’m too disorganised to do it.  An interesting dilemma; the tools to help the subject to organise will never be updated, because the subject is too disorganised to buy the stuff to help her organisational skills.  And what this means is that a present that I spent time raving about, turning the crisp new pages and exploring features that I never believed either a diary or a human would ever need, has been completely useless for an entire year.  I had failed to do the one thing I had promised myself – namely, sort my life out – even when given one of the most comprehensive diaries ever invented by that scary and unstoppable phenomenon of the Alpha Organiser.

Most of the pages, I reason, don’t even have anything written on them, so why pay for another set of pages when 60% of them will remain blank?  I know what you’re thinking, “The pages are blank because you don’t do anything all day, you lazy student”.  Not true, I protest.  For all you know, I might be writing this while preparing a plan to end world hunger, in preparation for my meeting with Bob Geldof next week.  (I’m not, of course, but I did just check my e-mails whilst simultaneously watching ‘Friends’ and making a cup of tea, which should count for something.)  The sad truth is, most of the pages are blank because even when I do have things to do, I never get round to writing them in.  It’s a terrible truth to admit to yourself; I am the person who writes a shopping list but forgets to take it into the shop, takes note of the place of meeting but not the date, craves some time to relax but can’t because I don’t know if I’m actually supposed to be doing something else.

It’s doesn’t all come down to my management though.  A part of the trouble is that I’m a self-saboteur.  The fact is, there’s a part of me (most probably the part that listens to too much Keith Richards) that constantly rebels against planning my life out and ridding it of all spontaneity.  That’s partly why we’re at uni, after all, to experience life exactly how we want and to ‘find ourselves’, before it’s all taken away from us when the evil-driven forces of the real and unforgiving world come crashing down.  That’s perhaps a slight exaggeration, but I do admit that around exam time, when every day gets to the point where I don’t know where I’m supposed to be – at work or in the library – until my Filofax tells me that today I’m working till 6 but then I’m in the library after that for my exam the next day – I do a start to resent it a bit.

And so my poor dear diary has seen in the last year our loving relationship turn to disuse and hatred.  I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, in its lonely place in the bottom of some bag that I once took to uni and never properly unpacked.  I have resolved that I will start using it again.  It’s getting to a busy time of year, I’ve just started a new job and I have a lot of coursework that I would actually like to spread over more than one panicked evening for a change.  “Yes”, I decided last week, “2011 will be my year,” (and you can see it’s already paying off – look how much in advance I decided I would wait to 2011 to improve my daily life).  I even went into the stationary shop to buy the new diary pages, but I forgot to take the Filofax with me, so I wasn’t sure what size of page to buy – I didn’t even know there were different sizes.

It’s ok though, I figured out I could just change the date on all the pages that I didn’t use in 2010 – 2011 is going to be a good year for me, I can feel it.

ED- for those of you who don’t know what a Filofax is it’s a non-electronic version of the calendar on your iPhone.

JLH