Sometimes I think I enjoy planning life more than I enjoy living it

When it comes to going to the gym, while I do genuinely like the act of lifting weights, what I really like is sitting down the week before and planning out which days I'll be working out and exactly which exercises I'll perform (with the attendant number of reps, sets, etc.)

In the same vein, Sunday afternoon is one of my favorite times because it's when I sit down and type my to-do list for the coming week into Microsoft OneNote.

And while I've never really had a vacation I didn't enjoy, to me nothing beats the fun and excitement of actually planning the vacation.

Do you see a pattern here?

I am by nature a planner. This is good thing to be in many respects, as it provides some degree of control – or at least the illusion of control – in an otherwise chaotic world.

But the drawbacks of being an inveterate planner are perhaps equally apparent. You don't always respond well when a plan (inevitably) goes awry. And you'll never be known as the most fun and spontaneous guy in the world.

There's also a tendency, at least in my case, to skip from one life plan to another in a futile attempt to discover the perfect way of living.

In my heart I know there is no such thing as "the perfect way of living," but my head insists it's out there somewhere and that, with each iteration of my life plan, I get that much closer to it.

To be clear, by "life plan" I mean a philosophy or approach to everything that consumes my time, both at home and at work. How should I do my job? How should I eat and exercise? When will I find time for spiritual nourishment? How much of my fall and winter nights should I devote to PA announcing gigs?

I try one life plan for a few months, then when I discover where it falls short, I switch to another. Sometimes these are small tweaks, while other times I make large-scale, wholesale changes.

All of which begs the question of why I can't just acknowledge that circumstances vary and I need to take things a day at a time, adapting to whatever comes my way without searching for a one-size-fits-all template.

In short, why don't I just, you know, live life?

As if often the case when I examine my own personality quirks, I don't have an answer to that question.

BUT...it's on tomorrow's to-do list to check some books out of the library that might explain why I am how I am.

I'm no Luddite, but I still organize my life largely with pencil and paper

If you're someone with a smartphone (and I really hope you are...it's 2024, after all), you have at your disposal thousands of apps to help manage your time and keep track of your life.

There are calendar apps and scheduling apps and reminder apps and apps that help you find other apps, etc. The best ones are simple to use and render some aspect of your life easier to wrangle.

I use many of these apps myself. But if you were to ask me, say, whether I'm free the evening of July 16th, I would grab my phone not to load one of these apps and check my availability, but rather to text my wife with a simple request.

"Hey, could you please send me a picture of the calendar page for July?"

She would respond with a photo of the calendar that hangs on the side of our refrigerator on which we write down important events, appointments, birthdays and anniversaries, and all manner of things of which we might need reminding.

As I say, there are plenty of apps that could do this for us, including some pretty nifty family calendar apps. But we choose to stick with the tried-and-true analog approach of writing stuff down on the kitchen calendar.

Similarly, while I construct my weekly to-do lists in Microsoft OneNote, my day-to-day lists are written in pencil on small sheets of lined white paper. As I accomplish each task, I check it off.

Are there faster and easier ways to do this digitally? Absolutely, especially within OneNote itself. But for whatever reason, I stick to non-digital wood byproduct as my medium of choice for daily task management.

I cannot tell you why I/we do it this way. Habit, maybe? Familiarity?

It's certainly not "ease of use." There's nothing easy about asking my wife to take a picture of our home calendar and text it to me. It would be much faster simply to consult a shared calendar app.

Maybe it's the satisfaction of physically checking something off a list. Or the subconscious connection to a time 40 years ago when my mom wrote everything on our own kitchen calendar.

Or possibly it's resistance to having to learn something new, though I really hope that's not it. The day I start thinking that way is the day you can feel free to put me in a nice rest home somewhere.

I guess it really is just force of habit. Eventually we'll shift our approach to all-digital timekeeping, I'm sure. In the meantime, I like to think it's a small nod to a slower time when we all collectively had less to do and more time to write it down.