Amy and I went to the FranklinCovey store today to get her a smaller planner that will fit in her purse. I started with a Classic Franklin when Coach Glenn gave me one in 1998. I later upgraded to a zip-around leather binder (very nice, but kind of big), which Amy adopted some time after I abandoned it for my Handspring Visor’s predecessor (a now-dead Palm III). She used it for a while, but found it too bulky, so we got her a smaller version today.
The FranklinCovey store is amazing. You walk in and instantly, you want to be professional and organized and scheduled to the max. You can do it. If you don’t believe you can, you can buy books or tapes or attend seminars to convince you that you can. Thousands of products, from Palm Zires to little flip notebooks to giant Monarch binders, scream “FILL ME WITH YOUR LIFE!” We are urged to be reliable, dependable, highly organized users of every minute of every day.
Instantly I sense that this is a modernist hangout. No one who is in any way postmodern could stand this place. It made me briefly loathe myself for all my wasted time this summer. Well, maybe my life was not intended to be full of appointments and tasks. Maybe my life was designed to be lived by priorities, by values, by meaningful accomplishments (all of which are rightly emphasized in Covey doctrine). But I like to think I will be more than a list of completed prioritized tasks when it is over.
I am led again to the conclusion that character is what endures. Covey is right that the tasks (and habits they form in us) do matter, because they influence the kind of people we become over time. I’m still not completely comfortable, though, with the drivenness and task-oriented paradigm of the Franklin. What would a purposeful life look like from a postmodern mindset?
UPDATE: I realized today (Wednesday) that during the school year, I never scheduled in time to unwind. Basically, I never wrote out a schedule for my off-work hours, because I felt like it was constraining. I guess that’s the point - to keep us only doing things we want to do. I don’t value relaxation enough to schedule it in - but I need it, so I end up wasting an hour and not really feeling relaxed afterward. For example, I want to get right to work, so I sit down at the computer and waste the next hour with some new downloaded piece of software. And it doesn’t work. I neither accomplish anything nor relax, because I don’t plan to relax. Hmm.
