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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Needs Versus Wants

Over the years I have struggled with organization tools. It is a joke in the house that every month I am overcome by the unrelenting desire to buy either a new planner (written or electronic) or a new phone (cordless or mobile).   My collection includes:

  • Day Runners in Multiple formats - Day at a Glance, Month at a Glance, Day at a Glance with a Month at a Glance page, and Week at a Glance
  • A series of 3 different Franklin Covey Binders all of different sizes (tiny, medium and mammoth) and all different materials (Pleather, leather and fabric).
  • Microsoft Outlook plus a written calendar (which is tedious and for some reasons the calendars never had the same info so I was always double booking things).
  • A Palm - a plain old digital organizer - no phone, no email or text (which I don't think even existed at the time).  The entire family got them for Christmas that year and we sat around all Christmas day entering contacts and then trying to beam them to each other. 
  • A Treo phone - great for organizing and would sync with Outlook but the phone sucked and email was very temperamental
  • A Blackberry - which I love
  • And finally, the mom organizer which is really cool and pretty and has lots of great pre-made list pages to use but is bulky and is used in conjunction with my Blackberry so it kind of defeats the purpose of being efficiently organized.


There is a planner graveyard in my house (more commonly known as underneath the guest bedroom bed) and this is where all of my old relics lie. My biggest challenge is that I need my system to be non-bulky and portable because, while I am a working mom, most of what I need relates to my kids and running the household.




At any given time my items will be housed in a purse that is stuffed full of necessary items like: wallet, keys, phone, pen, paper, crayons, obliterated goldfish in a sandwich bag, a spare pair of kid's underwear (sometimes I do worry that if people see it they will think I am a pedophile but that is a story for another time), matchbox cars, Nintendo DS with games, stuffed animals, and some chapstick.




After much discussion with my neighbor, who is also facing this problem, we have decided that we both NEED IPhones and IPads. Our husbands beg to differ and say that we really WANT these items so my argument is that yes we do WANT these items because we NEED to get out lives in order.




We search daily to see if there is an update on the rumor that Verizon is getting the IPhone in June - please please please please Verizon we NEED the IPhone. We have determined that we would do just fine with the WiFi IPad and don't need the 3G one (that will save you some money Dear). These 2 items would satisfy my strange desire to purchase organizers and phones all in one fail swoop and would make my life complete -- until the next new cool tool comes along

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