Day 22: Work on the so-called Control Journal
FlyLady suggests building a notebook as a tool to help us stay organized, calling it a Control Journal in analogy to the control tower at an airport. I don't resonate with that name -- it's too unclear to the buried parts of me who is controlling whom, and why. What I am building is simply a Useful Notebook. Hers is large, a three-ring binder in a case with lots of pockets for office supplies. Mine is hand-sized, so I can stick it in a small purse strapped around my waist and carry it with me at all times.
One of my friends introduced me to Midori Traveler’s notebooks in his blog about bullet journalling. The brilliant core idea is that you can build your own notebook by slipping booklets of various sorts through an elastic band around the notebook’s cover. There are a huge variety of covers one can buy (look on etsy under fauxdori and you’ll see what I mean), but I'm still figuring out what my needs are and have been reluctant to spend much money on something that may not suit me. For now, I’ve turned an unused passport cover (unearthed early in the orderliness project) into a notebook cover, with a bit of thin elastic from the sewing box wrapped around the spine a few times to hold booklets. I feel crafty and creative, and the notebook seems to be working.
So far, this is what I have in my notebook:
One homemade booklet for making daily lists, which I tear out as I finish them.
One homemade booklet with printed boxes for writing meal plans.
One nice booklet I bought for writing more enduring things, like daily routines, cleaning checklists, and words of encouragement.
One sheet of blotter paper stuck in as a bookmark, because ink dries very slowly on that nice booklet.
One plastic zipper pocket and card sleeve, bought on Amazon for cheap.
Post-it notes and tape flags attached inside the front cover with double-sticky tape.
A pen holder and pencil holder, made from elastic hot-glued to tiny binder clips.
In past attempts to do FlyLady, I've always made a large notebook -- I still have a huge binder from one earlier effort, which I did use for a while to put papers from whatever project I was working on, along with odds and ends I was afraid of forgetting (how much spaghetti to cook for 30 people at a family reunion, instructions for my daughter's orthodontic treatment, ideas for how to entertain two medium-small children on rainy days). The problem with the big notebook is that is stays in one place and I am usually somewhere else. I need my external memory to be accessible at all times. That’s the genius of the tiny notebook. As undersized as it is, I am actually using it.
