Organising my way through 2012

Blasted New Year's Resolutions.  I haven't made any as such, but they always get me in the end.  It's almost hypnotic, the need to cleanse and start afresh at the beginning of January; to try and do something you've never quite managed before.  In my case, this seems to be Getting Myself Organised.

It's funny, the relationship I have with organisation.  I once went to see a careers coach, and she gave me an exercise to do whereby I had to ask five people (friends, not random people off the street, though that might have been interesting!) to give me five words they thought best described me.  From the assorted mixture of five people I asked, all but one of them gave me the word "organised".  This absolutely astounded me, because I have always thought of myself as the least organised person I know.  I organise nothing.  My life is a series of sometimes tenuously linked but otherwise entirely haphazard events that occur independently of my control.  This is part of my problem with life; that I've never ever felt grown-up enough to plan something and then make it properly happen.  I don't make lists; if I ever start one I slap myself and throw the pen across the room in abject terror that I may become a Real List Person and therefore a stranger to myself; a stranger with plans and ideas I might then have to live up to.  I have no little diary (or iPhone app, or indeed an iPhone) reminding me what I've got planned, because I have always prided myself on knowing instinctively what I've got planned without having to write it down anywhere (that, or I've never been popular enough to have too many conflicting things planned at any one time.  Hmmmm).

But at the end of December I found myself buying a little pink 2012 diary I can keep in my handbag, "just in case".  And then I was bought a calendar for Christmas by someone lovely, and that went up in my office, and I kept looking at its blank dates and all I could think was "I should at least note when people's birthdays are, so I don't forget" - even though I Never Forget People's Birthdays.  I Never Forget Anything, in fact.  I am like an elephant - but only with respect to memory, I hasten to add.

So I got my Cliff calendar (did I not mention what sort of calendar it was?), and I got my little pink diary, and I started actually writing things in them.  And I found the process depressing as I methodically wished the year away with every turn of the page and with every Groundhog Day-style entry I made.

So to cheer myself up I selected random dates and wrote things like "spray-tan...go apricot this time!" or "An Audience with Stephen Hawking and Alan Titchmarsh - 8pm" or "Breakfast at Greasy Spoon - don't forget own alcohol" and then I wrote present ideas under each person's birthday I'd just written down, like "Voucher for Deluxe Colonic Irrigation" or "Bag of Tickly Feathers" (these weren't ideas for the same person).  And then I drew absent-minded doodles over some of the dates.  

But I am still more organised this year than I was the last.  So it's going good, so far.