I can't tell you how many times I've picked up my phone to do one specific thing and ended up doing something completely different.

Maybe I'm in the kitchen and realize I'm almost out of something, so I grab my phone to put it on the grocery list. Except when I open my phone, there's a text waiting for me. I read it, answer it, maybe remember something else while I'm doing that, and a few minutes later I put the phone back down. The grocery list never even got opened.

Sometimes I'll catch myself and think, Wait, why did I pick up my phone in the first place? If I'm lucky, I'll remember. If I'm not, whatever I was going to add to the list is gone until I need it and realize I never bought it.

I've done versions of this for years, although I don't think I've ever given much thought to the fact that I have also spent years finding ways around it.

Back when my kids were in school, I figured out pretty quickly that if something wasn't on my calendar, there was a pretty good chance it wasn't happening. Between school activities, appointments, practices and everything else that comes with having active kids, I couldn't depend on remembering that somebody needed to be somewhere Thursday at 4:30. It had to go on the calendar. In fact, in the days before cell phones, I was known to write reminders on my hand until I got home to the calendar I kept hanging on my fridge. 

That became one area where I was very organized. Something came up, I put it on the calendar, and we all knew where to look to see what was happening that week. I still do that now - it's just on my cell phone these days.

And it's such an automatic part of how I keep track of my life that I don't really think about it anymore.

I wish I could tell you that level of organization carried over into everything else. It definitely does not.

I like being organized. I like the idea of everything having a place, knowing where things are and not having clutter hanging around waiting to be dealt with. However, actually getting and keeping everything that way is a completely different story.

The weird thing is that even though my house is cluttered, I usually have a pretty good mental inventory of what's here. I can often tell you that, yes, I have one of those, and I have a decent idea of where it is. So apparently my brain is perfectly willing to keep track of some random thing I haven't used in three years, but the thing I wanted to put on the grocery list five minutes ago doesn't always make the cut.

The calendar is different because I learned a long time ago not to leave those things to chance... I mean, I absolutely didn't want to forget to pick up a kid somewhere! If I make an appointment, it goes on the calendar. If someone asks me to be somewhere, it goes on the calendar. If I agree to something three weeks from now, it definitely goes on the calendar. I've been doing that for so long that it's just part of how I function.

I didn't come up with the calendar habit because I had some great organizational system for my life. I came up with it because forgetting appointments and activities wasn't an option, especially when I had kids depending on me to remember where everybody needed to be. So I figured out something that worked, and I've kept doing it.

There are other areas where I haven't figured out something that works nearly as well. I can still put something somewhere "so I'll remember where it is" and then have absolutely no idea where that very sensible place was... when I eventually find that perfect place again, it's going to be one heck of a treasure trove of important stuff! 😂

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why? Yep. Me too. And I can still intend to do something, get distracted along the way, and realize later that I never did it. I can look around my house and know exactly how I'd like it to be organized without somehow making the leap from knowing what I want to actually getting it there and keeping it that way.

I guess that's the part that interests me. I've never fit neatly into either "organized" or "disorganized." I'm really organized about some things and decidedly not about others. I've found ways to make certain things work because at some point they became important enough that I had to. Other things are still very much a work in progress.

Maybe that's true for everybody. Maybe we all have things we've gotten really good at keeping track of and other things that seem determined to escape us. I really don't know.

But I do know I'm probably not the only person who has picked up her phone to add something to the grocery list, answered a text instead, put the phone down and then stood there thinking...

Okay, what was I doing?