The other day, I misremembered Michelle’s memnomic for leaving the house. She didn’t list four Fs, she listed five. The fifth, that I had missed, was Franklin, for the Franklin-Covey planner she uses for her work.
It’s ironic that I would have forgotten this item, since I’m the main proponent of the Franklin Planner system in our family, and would never think of leaving the homestead without mine. And, various circumstances have called the planner to mind lately, and given me cause to access its usefulness in our current lifestyle.
When we first moved to the homestead, I questioned whether a Franklin planner would be useful to me. Lately, I’ve been going through the archive binders that store previous years’ pages, and I’ve made an interesting discovery.
Leafing through the binders from the years before we moved to the homestead—back when I had a “real job” in the “real world”—the pages struck me as unnaturally sparse. The task lists that I made before moving to the homestead are noticeably shorter than those I write today!
This is an eye opener. There are so many different ways to interpret this information. Is it that I’m busier now than I used to be? Is it that in my old life, my routine was so set and predictable that I had no need to write down many of the tasks I performed? Or, did much of what I did back then matter less to me?
Most likely, it’s a combination of all of these. True, many routine parts of my life don’t get listed. I never bother to write down tasks that I perform as needed, such as chopping firewood. I still reserve the “to do” aspect of the planner for larger projects than day-to-day maintenance. It could simply be that, now that I manage my own time, I have a bit more leisure to plan ahead? It’s hard to say. I’m pleased, though, to see that after more than 7 years of living this lifestyle, the Franklin planner continues to be a true homestead tool, every bit as essential as flashlight, fob, and phone. Maybe not as essential as food, though . . . .