I just spilled coffee all over my desk. Everywhere. All of the porous surfaces of my workspace are now stained with black liquid deliciousness. And it wasn’t even a purposeful spill—I didn’t jump up in a eureka! moment, sloshing the coffee over the rim of my cup—I just picked up the cup and turned it over, upon which, the cold coffee that I did not know the cup contained fell, as gravity demanded, from its container and splashed onto three of my planners.

Dammit. Goddammit. I mean F—wait, I mean, yay!

I have a lot of planners (see “Intention” from January). I love buying them, exploring them, turning them over in my hands, creating little tabs and pen test pages, but I’m terrible at actually using them. 

One of the challenges of a pristine new planner is that you have to, essentially, deface it. You have to write all over it. You have to limit the infinite opportunity of each wide-open day with time-bound and permanently inscribed constraints. And if you don’t—if you don’t write anything on the row, column, or page for Wednesday, you can’t re-purpose Wednesday. You can't decide to make a six-day week and skip out on Wednesday for that far sexier Thursday or just start the whole week over and give Monday another whirl. Wednesday is gone. It’s forever blank.

Unless it’s covered in coffee.

Two of my journals got it the worst—the two that have been sitting on my desk unused and taunting me mightily with their blankness.

But I showed them.

And now that they are ruined, I know what to do.

The first is a little A6 planner/journal that I got in April and was going to use as a writing journal. And then, in June, it was repurposed as my morning writing journal. Since I basically slept through June, that didn't happen, so in July I decided it would serve as my “one book July” journal and would be the only planner I would use for the whole month. I used about 10 pages before today’s Great Concoffination.

But now it will be the little splattered book of experiments. It will be the book in which I try things, in which I break all the planner rules—redate months, tear out pages, ignore what I planned. It’s where I will pilot everything and follow through on nothing—with authority rather than with distraction. 

I might even make my unused June into a second July and forget all about August. Ha!

The other victim/victor of today’s incident is the planner that was going to save this blog.

With summer coming to a close, the first quarter of my personal year starting in September (fall semester/back to school), and 2022 just around the corner, I’ve been exploring, well, new planners.

I got a used copy of the “Get to Work Book” that was blank from July through the end of the year. I figured I’d give it six months to get me to work on this blog and website. So far in using this planner I’ve discovered that if I tear out all the blank pages and trim the date off the top of the page, the unused pages make great to-do lists for my kids.

Other than that, it’s done nothing for me, my blog, or my business. Until the coffee.

Now I know I can Get to Rid of It.

I’m not getting rid of it because it is tainted—honestly, it’s barely splattered—the back cover did its job and protected the book. I’m getting rid of it because I felt relieved when disaster befell it, and I didn’t have to figure out how to Get to Work with this book anymore.

It’s not the book’s fault—it’s a perfectly planny planner. It has dates and calendars and lines for lists, pages for projects, and grids for goals. It captures each day of the week in Helvetic efficiency, providing a box to check which evidences success on each alternating day of grey.

For years, I have been trying to check the right boxes in the right way at the right time in the right planner. I’m not here to say there is no right way—there probably is and there are definitely ways that are better than others (”you do you” is the least helpful piece of advice ever). And I’m beginning to think that a better way needs more than an outline with three main points. It needs a full story. And space to write it that’s not grey.

Like Dorothy, I've had the power to save this blog all along.

I don’t need a structured planner or expensive paper or special pens. I just need to write.

And drink from a coffee cup with a lid. 

And, yes, okay, I do need a few special pens.