First, go ahead and buy a really expensive planner. Preferably a Kate Spade or Erin Condren. That planner is your lifeline. It must be with you at all times, which means toting around a ginormous purse everywhere - the grocery store, the roller rink, the shower.
You must make sure to then color-code every single aspect of your life. Including, but not limited to, a different color for every class, work, family member, shower time, blogging, grocery lists. In order to ensure that you use the right color, create a key at the beginning of the planner. Birthdays must have their own color as well. This means that your purse must be big enough to carry the 10 different colored ballpoint pens you've just bought.
The very first day write in everything you can remember that's happening, due, or due to happen. Spend hours making the planner personalized and pretty. Because above all else, your organizational tool must be organized and neat. It need not be efficient or effective as long as it looks the part.
The next days proceed to forget it at home. Fail to write in every detail of your life. Forget your pens and get stuck writing with pencil. And by the end of the year be looking at a planner that is 90% blank. With the rest of the 10% filled with illegible pencil scribbles and sticky note lists outlining a days work. Want to throw away said planner because (1) it didn't help you and (2) you feel like you defaced it with your need for perfectionism.
Because let's face it. Maybe 2% of the world population can actually pull off an organizer like that (kudos to that 2%, keep doing what you're doing). The rest of us are stuck with the likes of sticky notes and google doc, and the occasional missed appointment. Life doesn't like to be orderly, no need to try and make it so. Perhaps spend less time and money trying to organize your life, and more time just living it.
