Part of making executive function work is meeting yourself where you are, and I've finally accepted that maybe I'm not at a place where manually writing out the dates and whatnot in a $5 flip-floppy planner is something I can be bothered to do and still keep up with anymore. I asked myself "Can you, on top of everything you intend to organize with this thing, also sit down one day a week and structure the entire thing by yourself ahead of time?" and the answer was "Hell no." And so I decided, after sabotaging myself with overcommitment (and stinginess) this year, to buy a legit (dated, structured, ~fancy~) planner for 2023.
I'll be real: I don't go for planners with personality, which makes finding a complete/non-cheap one, uh, challenging in today's ecosystem. I don't respond to empty positive reinforcement from an inanimate object, and I don't go for glam femme stuff. This and my need to hold a new type of blank book in my hands before I commit to buying it means I eventually bought a plain-ass black Moleskine with 2023 impressed on the cover from the bookstore in my neighborhood. I don't think they even had other colors in stock. Hell, this model of Moleskine might only come in classic satin black for all I could tell. This suits me fine because I only want my planner to reveal Things about me if you sit down and read it. I intend to bring this thing to work and school and all over town, and I like to maintain a mysterious reputation.
The interior is also, from my initial assessment of it, pretty much what I'd like. It has a micro-scale monthly calender I've already blocked out with all my work/study stuff in highlighter, a larger scale monthly calendar section with room for writing in that I'm filling month to month with my development schedule for Burn This City and other projects, and the weekly planner/to-do section that makes up the majority of the book's pages. The interior is as plain as the cover with an acceptable amount of space for doodling and embellishing and crossing out. I like to have room for inevitable chaos.
I put aside a couple hours on Christmas Eve to block out all my regularly scheduled days and familiarize myself with the book's format, which is perhaps overkill but felt necessary when I considered how many times I tried and failed to keep a schedule this year. If I'm going to drag my carcass out of the temporal chaos that's destroyed my habits over the last 18 months, I need to throw my whole ass into it. Or at least as much ass as I can spare.
Hard to say how well it'll go until I get the hang of it, but I'll sit down and do a little audit of my progress and impressions once we're a week into 2023.
Look at this mess!! But I did make it, and for the moment that's all that counts. Will it look different when I'm not actively depressed? One cannot say. I choose to be proud that I got it up and running in the first place. A wise man once said 'I code like a cat in a wet paper bag,' and boy howdy that's true of me. There's a reason I didn't make this kind of thing my profession.
As for introductions, I go by Nemo (and various fandom-specific pseudonyms when writing fanfic) online and my main Thing is writing SFF fiction for other developmentally arrested queer adults. I am so dedicated to writing for adults, as a matter of fact, that clicking the link to my fiction section will bring you to a stern reminder that the material I write is not for babies. It's not pornographic, but the reality marketting has foisted on all SFF writers is one in which if you aren't writing for snot-nosed kids and the creeps who decide what's acceptable for them to read you have to be upfront and explicit about that.
I'll also be spilling a lot of pixels talking about the internet and how I organize mt thoughts/manage my time. I love the internet and live with constant executive function problems, so these things are important to me.
