Step away from the stickers...

I love office supplies.  I love office supply stores.  Sure, they sell pens and paper and binders and staples, but what they really sell is the illusion of order.  I can buy that all day, every day.

My social media feeds right now are full of ads for different kinds of planners and journals.  The ads have lovely photos of calendar pages with neat handwriting, color coding, stickers.  They have slogans that encourage me to meet those goals, realize those dreams!

Maybe those systems work.

Here is what I do know:  reaching goals is seldom an orderly process and probably has nothing to do with pretty penmanship, unless that is, in fact, the goal itself.

We reach goals by setting plans, yes.  Those plans need to be orderly enough that we can decipher them, but they certainly don’t need to be color-coded or sticker-based.  (That said, back when I was a non-profit administrator and later when I was an office manager, I learned that people will do a remarkable amount of crazy stuff to get a gold star sticker…)

We also reach goals by understanding that our plans may not match up with reality.  The real path to a goal is seldom charted out only once, in ink, in a tidy progression from point A to point B.  The path is more like a wave or a squiggle, with unexpected high and low deviations.  We go forward a while, then stop.  Sometimes we go backwards.  Sometimes we take a side path and realize that was what we should have been doing all along.

Some of us do excel using fancy planners and stickers and colored ink.  For some of us, finding the ultimate organizational system really will be the key to unlocking our dreams.  But some of us really need permission to wallow around in the messy process of creation.

I’m on my own messy journey and I’m happy to accompany any fellow travelers.