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21st Challenge
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LIVING BY THE BOOK | PAGE 2 OF 3
I showed up at 8:30 a.m., prompt but bleary-eyed, at a midtown Manhattan hotel -- me and a couple dozen other perennially disorganized people, ready to be initiated into the Franklin way by an instructor named Montie Horton. Energetic but not hyper, cheerful without being a cheerleader, her demeanor was carefully calibrated to appeal to and motivate a wide range of personalities. She's a professional people-knower, the kind who remembers names and professions. Throughout the day, Horton took us through our TimeQuest workbooks, in which we took notes and inscribed the "Natural Laws" she dictated -- the first being that "successful managers of time are willing to do that which unsuccessful people do not do." In other words, we were already better than the other schlubs who are not willing to go on a TimeQuest. We learned how to establish Governing Values, from which Long-Range Goals and the Intermediate Steps to achieve them are derived: These all go in the back of the Planner, behind a "Values and Goals" tab. The idea is that they will filter up into the front of the book to shape Prioritized Daily Task Lists and monthly Master Task Lists. Why? Because you look at them each day and plan them into your life. Toward the end of the seminar, Horton urged us to follow the day's lessons diligently for 21 days -- which, as some of the smarter go-getters knew, is how long it takes to acquire a habit. As we were packing up, she called out gaily, "Make sure that elements that denote success surface regularly in your Planner!" I think this was the Franklinite way of saying "Have fun!" Like religious converts or recovering addicts, Franklinites are distinguished by their faith, as well as a sense of community. AA members identify themselves by asking, "Are you a friend of Bill W.?" while Franklinites are apt to spot each others' binders and observe, "Oh -- so you do the Franklin Planner?" That verb indicates a crucial difference between those who merely use a day planner and those who do the Franklin Planner. There's a "saved" aspect to them -- an ever-present consciousness of the difference between their bad, pre-Franklin selves and their new, improved selves. At the seminar, Horton asked whether any of us had rooted around in the trash desperately searching for a scrap of paper we'd assumed was useless. Alcoholics swill mouthwash, junkies turn tricks to pay for a fix -- and the disgustingly disorganized paw through their garbage. Most of us had, in fact, degraded ourselves in this way. "Now that's not very good for your self-esteem, is it?" she chided. And just as AA meetings and a belief in a Higher Power keep recovering alcoholics from falling off the wagon, the Planner itself -- as well as, for many Franklinites, "refresher" TimeQuest seminars -- are all that stands between them and a life of dissolution and disorganization. In fact, a lot of Franklin converts do have a crisis or epiphany that leads them to take on immaculate organizational skill. Some, after an intervention of sorts, are made to go to the seminar by their higher-ups. Gabriel Garay, a self-professed Franklin freak, went to the TimeQuest seminar against his will, on his birthday, almost a year ago. "I left there with a really bad headache," he remembers, but it didn't take long before he was a model Franklinite. "Before, I would scribble phone numbers on the edge of newspapers. I never returned calls -- people would get really mad at me." Now his Planner includes a "Phone Log" designed to eliminate that problem. "I won't listen to my answering machine without it," he says. Ann Marie Morris has been a Franklinite since 1988, when her boss told her in no uncertain terms, "Get yourself a planner or get yourself a new job." (At that time, she was an events organizer for Merrill Lynch, and accidentally sent the COO as the guest of honor to a cocktail party intended for the CEO.) Morris became such an avid user that her current employer, Chase Manhattan, paid for her to be a certified TimeQuest instructor for her co-workers. You could say that she's an in-house evangelist for Franklin Planners. The parallels between the daily Franklin devotions and more conventional religious practices are certainly not lost on Franklinites. "My friends all think I'm gone for this -- they admire it, but they also see it as fanaticism," says Garay. And Morris admits with a sheepish grin, "It really is kind of like a cult, it's a little weird." Hyrum W. Smith himself, in the introductory tape, role-plays a non-Franklinite: "I'm one of those that's gonna give you a hard time about carrying this book," he warns. "They're gonna say, 'What'd you do, join a cult? You're carrying this crazy book!'" See, one of the ground rules is to have the Planner with you always; another is to spend 10-20 minutes each day with it in "Planning and Solitude." Members of most any faith engage in prayer and solitude, often as a request for divine guidance, but planning and solitude is simply guiding yourself. Who needs God and the Good Book when you've got your Values & Goals and a Franklin Planner? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T_P A G E .|.
Ben Franklin: One organized dude!
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