Best Results Organizing

My dear reader, when you got back to work or school or your regular routine after the holidays, was something not quite right?  Have you found that after multiple days wondering “Wait, what day is today?”, you feel like you’ve lost a few days or even a week?

What does it mean to lose time?  I’m not talking about a Ray Milland-style Lost Weekend  complete with raucous over-imbibing, but situations where, through no naughty behavior on your part, important days are completely lost. 

Case in point:  Last week, the brilliant Stephen Fry (as in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves & Wooster, acting partner of Hugh Laurie (House), and director of Bright Young Things) posted the following to Twitter, the addictive social networking/microblogging service:

Wouldn’t losing your birthday annoy you?  And what about all those kids born on Leap Day, February 29th?  It must seem entirely unfair to them to lose their birthdays three out of four years.

Around-the-globe flights and Leap Days aren’t the only ways we lose time.  In case you were snoozing (and missed about 52 minutes of time) during high school Social Studies, you may not know that we all lost about a dozen days.  Well, not “we” as in us, you (and you, and you) and I, because we weren’t born yet, but historically speaking, depending on where our ancestors lived, we have lost anywhere from ten to fourteen days!

Didn’t know that?  Let Professor Paper Doll give you the Cliff’s Notes version.

Everybody used to use the old Julian calendar.  (OK, not everybody.  Not the Chinese, which is why their new year is later this month, nor those following the Hebrew calendar, which starts the year at Rosh Hashanah, in early Fall.  But a whole hunk of Europe following the days of the Roman Empire…back when the European calendars were getting the most use and attention.)  The Julian calendar was a lunar calendar, with dates calculated according to the phases of the moon, dating back to the start of what is known as Anno Domini or the Common Era. 

HEY!  WAKE UP!  (This is what happened to you in Social Studies, isn’t it?)  Trust me, this’ll be quick.

Suffice it to say that back in olden days, the Catholic Church used a lunar calendar to properly calculate Easter, but after some number of centuries, everything got out of whack and the vernal equinox kept getting moved around, so that Easter showed up anywhere from March 22 to April 25!  (Right–you’re thinking that meant that half the time, the marshmallow Peeps were stale by then!)

They kept making tweaks, but by the 16th century, the lunar calendar and the real Moon (yeah, the one with the giant leap for mankind!) were four days out of phase. If everyone kept going on like that, it would soon be snowing on Independence Day!

So, the Catholic Church decided to correct the calendar.  It took a while for them to get the whole thing moving, so if you want to read about everything they tried, feel free, but the biggie is that they solved the problem of “drift” over the 13 centuries since the Council of Nicaea by just ZAP!!! deleting ten days from the calendar.

So, if you went to bed on Thursday, October 4, 1582 on the old (Julian) calendar, when you woke up the next morning, it was Friday, October 15, 1582 on the new (Gregorian) calendar, and you’d lost 10 days!  (Good luck if you forgot to TIVO Roman Idol–Results Show!)  As if that weren’t freaky enough, when this whole thing began, Spain, Italy, Portugal and (what was, in the 16th and 17th centuries) the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth all joined in, but non-Catholic countries and much of the rest of the world said “Uh, no thanks!”, kind of like how parts of Indiana rejected Daylight Savings Time prior to 2006.

It took hundreds of years for all of the other countries to eventually jump on the bandwagon–as time went on, adopters had to skip eleven, then twelve, and eventually fourteen days to catch up. Greece adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1923, and China in 1929.  As a possession of Great Britain, the soon-to-be-known-as United States adopted it in 1752; however, Alaska still belonged to Russia and thus did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1867.  This is why you’ll often read books that refer to Shakespeare’s or Washington’s dates of birth under the “old” calendar with a sniff of derision.  In many cases, remote areas took so long to fall in line, that there’s no certainty as to matching up of dates.

Can you imagine if you lived near a national border or were trying to accomplish any sort of diplomacy?  You invite the King of Norway to dinner, but you’re so offended when he doesn’t show up, you decide to start a war.  Just as you’ve waved off your generals, King Ole shows up–almost two weeks late, and now he’s offended that you haven’t cooked or even put on the nice tablecloth and is ready to do battle! Oy, vey.

What is the point of all of this little history lesson?  Having multiple calendars that aren’t in sync with one another isn’t merely disorganized.  It’s disorienting and can cause upheaval in the lives of all of the little fiefdoms that surround you.
My first blog post of 2008 was about selecting and using your calendar.  All of the contents of that post are still valid, so please go back and check it out if you’re not certain how to pick the right calendar for you.  But there’s something else I should have said.  You may have heard the adage:

The man with one watch knows what time it is. 
The man with two watches is never sure.

It might be ideal, but the truth is that it’s not always feasible to have only one calendar.  If you’re a busy corporate parent with your business obligations filling up your own work calendar in the office and a group-wide Google calendar with your colleagues, and you’re also trying to make sure that your spouse’s commitments and the plans of your kids (the little and not-so little ones) don’t conflict, you know that one calendar isn’t going to do it.  If you’re a Paper Doll reader, you’re probably the defacto designee in charge of making sure all these potential conflicts get stopped in their tracks.  So, to avoid wars with Norway (and your family and co-workers), bear in mind the following tips:

1. Have a portable calendar or planner.  As I stated in last year’s blog, it’s your commitment to the system, rather than the format, that matters most.  However, you have to be able to verify your prior obligations before you can confer with the orthodontist, the PTA bake sale planning committee or the Vice President in charge of Norwegian distribution.  That means you have to have your calendar with you, whether it’s paper or digital.
2. Have an ALL-FAMILY calendar at home in a high-traffic area.  Make it clear that it’s everyone’s obligation to post the dates for their soccer games and band concerts, corporate conferences and slumber parties.
3. Schedule a block of SYNC TIME (that can’t be canceled, negotiated or skipped over due to national degree) each week for making sure that nothing has changed or moved.  Families are busier than ever; if yours is up in arms, scheduling time for diplomacy can earn you a little dtante.  

Getting and staying organized is all about creating homes (physical or temporal) for your stuff and tasks to live.  While Paper Doll can’t stop the loss of leap day birthdays or time zone wormholes (yet), I hope 2009 will find you and the Norways in your life to be compatible and always on the same (calendar) page.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Happy Get Organized Month!