I coulda been a contender!

I signed up to do the Best Self Planner Graduate Challenge where you show your planner every day on their Facebook group page, and right away, I ran into trouble.

You see… I made a mistake in my planner. In ink. And it took me several days to figure out what to do about it–copy blank pages, carefully trim them to the exact page size with scissors, glue them in, and start over.

But I was on the road, so that took a while… Belinda picked me up a pair of  scissors and a big fat glue stick, but then I got worried about where to put the glue. And page pucker, and whether that was the best glue for the job  and exactly how to apply it–all over like wall paper glue? Or in spots?

I never believed that this was too much trouble to go through because I knew that without starting over, I’d be unable to use my book. This was not a preference but a priority… This began on the 29 of July. It is now the 18th of August. I guess I wanted to say something about this because there are times when all of us have obstacles–whether of our own making or outside our sphere of influence.

There are times when it appears almost laughably easy to fix a problem. To an outsider, there might have been a hundred solutions, buy another journal being the most drastic, I guess–and because I considered that, and because I got really worried about how long the journal would take to arrive, I did not do that.

Let’s count. July 29th – August 18. I was paralyzed by perfectionism for… 21 days?

Can I just say I have an above average IQ and I’m educated and I have the advantage of being aware of my problem and having several hundred solutions at my fingertips, and I still couldn’t solve it for 21 days.

While my productivity during that period was high, it was high in spite of the fact that I’m not using my planner and not because of it. And that was 21 days wasted in recrimmination too–why are you like this? Just buy another goddamned planner, or tear out the pages and move on, or copy the pages and paste them in, or get your hands up, middle fingers out and wave them in the air…

Eventually, the argument always devolves – you’re losing ground in a terrifying world and you won’t survive…

I felt that if I didn’t meet the goals I would have written down, I’d be letting the planner down, and it’s such an awesome little tool. The responsibility to prove that my little planner is amazing is crushing me.

O.o

I’m pretty sure this is not unique to me. Talk to me about it.