Thanks for your understanding. I don’t have much of an appetite but I’m out of bed and that’s a good thing. Best wishes to Jodee’s family for a speedy recovery. Here are your Monday Markets:
Please help keep us going.Leads…
Hi All,
The stomach bug is over here today as well. I’m OK but my daughter is feeling awful. I’m running a little late this morning as a result. I’ll have job leads up soon, though.
Jodee
Please help keep us going.If you’ve been listening to the podcasts here at FreelanceSwitch.com, you know that I am a sucker for nice office supplies. Anything with color, anything with a cute design…these are the things that make my office a restful, organized place for me.
But there is that time of year that stirs it all up for me—when I need to refill my planner.
Don’t ask me why, but I can never find the pages with the layout that I like. I go from store to store each year searching for weekly pages with horizontal daily planning room. Instead, I find pages with tiny one-inch columns and scores of hourly markers down the side that are ideal mostly for busy doctors. This is my challenge.
I own one of those fake leather binder types of planners, which cost me about $40 a few years back. (It’s about 5”x8”, and a dull shade of wondrous lavender, to boot!) To save on buying a new planner each year, I always plan on getting refill pages for it to kick off the New Year when I’ve run out of old pages. Simple, right?
This is always a nightmare for me. Every. Single. Year.
I began this year’s hunt in December, as dates were starting to fill up for January. Having nowhere to write things down, I began to panic and reach for the Post-It’s. I’m a very visual kind of gal and I need to have things organized in simple, bulleted lists. I also need the right planner pages. To me, this means having a yearly tabbed calendar and weekly pages where I can prioritize my to-do list horizontally. It’s just what works for me.
After hunting around on the Internet and finding the pages I liked, I balked at the price. Here they were—perfect pristine refill pages without the number slots. There were simply about 10 or so lines to write out my list of to-do’s each day. There were no restrictive columns or unsightly extras—just what I needed. They ran about $25. But they had a garden design. I can’t even grow weeds in a pot. I decided to shop around.
Then came the Moleskine. I was set on getting one of their planners because everyone raves about them. So I thought I’d give Old Lav a rest. Just when I ordered it on Amazon, the universe must have somehow collided. About a week later (and closer to January, with dates piling up on Post-It™ notes, now) Amazon emails me to tell me they’re out of that planner. Do I want to reorder in the smaller size?
No way, Jose. Again, I need simple clean pages. Why is this so hard? And is everyone on earth really writing in one-inch columns and enjoying it? (It’s okay if you are.)
Finally, after popping in countless office supply stores, I decided to follow the bread crumbs back to Target, where I found my pages last year after weeks of toil. Surely, they would have them!
But no! The small selection of pages all that had vertical columns running down the pages, with those ever-so-annoying hourly slots. There are tons of pages that enable you to plan your whole day over the span of two pages, but I realize I would be wasting paper that way.
Alas, there is a light. I found the tabbed calendar pages where you can see a month over two pages and bought those there. They were six bucks. Came home and put them in. Okay, Kristen, I thought to myself. You’re halfway there. You just need the pages where you have your week spread out over two pages and you have plenty of space to make your obsessive (sometimes color-coded) to-do lists.
A few days later, after a trip to Barnes and Noble, I score a cute lavender planner for just six bucks. I decided to stop being fanatical and just settle for what’s out there. Now my Target pages are obsolete, but at least I have a planner. After going through and writing birthdays and now importing my January reminders into the thing, I realize it’s true—I just can’t do this all year. I can’t ignore the numbers running down the sides of the pages. I can’t make my handwriting smaller to fit in these puny columns. So I slept on it. Woke up, tossed the planner in the garbage, and went to a different Staples.
There before me, like a Christmas miracle, are my pages. On the bottom row where no one would ever see them, among countless planner refill pages with icky designs and planner pages that promise maximum organization but make me want to shoot myself, they are there. Unfortunately the only design is pink and purple flowers, but they are at least there. I can live with flowers after all. The pages are about 12 dollars. But I don’t care—I’ve got to have them. If I don’t end this debacle once and for all, I may start writing February’s deadlines into the wood on my desk.
And so, the great calendar debacle ends. After weeks of countless shopping. After seeing droves of brand new organizers with the pages I like in them staring before me, I have managed not to rip them out and run out of stores. After seeing thousands of columns on plain black-and-white pages, I have risen above and not given in. I’ve conquered.
Aside from my bizarre quirk about the right planner refill pages, there is a moral to the story, I swear.
Whatever you need to do business, get it. It could be the right lamp or that desk that’s perfectly ergonomical. It could be the printer that flawlessly fits on your desk, as opposed to the one you’d have to rewire your entire office to accommodate. It could be planner refill pages that suit your to-do list style.
Whatever it is, don’t sacrifice your comfort. These things may seem small, but they are everything when it comes to helping you run your business smoothly. And you’re worth it.
I do realize I am a bit obsessive. But after filling in dates and writing my infamous to-do lists in this, my official new calendar of 2008, I can tell you the year already looks even better. At least on paper.
Kristen Fischer is a freelance writer and author living in New Jersey. Her first book, Creatively Self-Employed: How Writers and Artists Deal with Career Ups and Downs is available at www.creativelyselfemployed.com.
Today is a month since we launched the book as a for-download PDF ebook. I’m happy to announce we now have it available via Lulu.com as a paperback!
The book costs $35 (to account for publishing fees and Lulu’s commissions) and you can grab it immediately from the Lulu site.
You can also view the first few pages along with the contents pages in the Lulu Book Preview.
And of course the PDF is still available for $29 and has been purchased by over 700 people!
Purchase a PDF copy of the book online and pay via PayPal.
Purchase a paperback copy of the book, via Lulu.com
Because we believe in continually improving things, we’ve now set about creating a second edition of the book. We’re trying to address any criticisms found in reviews of the book or from customers. If you have any feedback or suggestions you’d like to give or make, then please do fill in this feedback form, and thank you in advance for helping us better our product!
We’re working hard on a Rockstarbooks website and more books, so look out for more announcements soon!