I have a stationery obsession. I cannot walk past a pen or art shop and not stop. I go in and drool at all the prettiness. As I have gotten older so I have managed to control the impulse to buy. But I still drool. As part of my stationery obsession, I have a teeny aligned problem with planners. This goes way back: I have old footage of me in a cabaret routine I did at University where we gave each cabaret artiste in the retinue (what we thought, at 19, was) a witty middle moniker. Mine was “Filofax”. Hey, it was an icon of its time and I advance, in my defence, my early desire to tap into the prevailing zeitgeist. Aah, those heady, money obsessed 1980s.
I have, since, my obsession with Filofaxes, read most of the literature on personal productivity and invested in more “systems” than has been good for my bank balance: Covey, GTD, 48Folders, Moleskine, Bullet Journals, Daily Greatness, and a few more. In reading about all these “systems”, I have tried (and failed) to follow them like a good little disciple, believing that they would be the secret to my success in life.
Just a little before the start of my interest in succeeding via Filofax, Tom Peters published his book, In Search of Excellence. The book showcased a number of “successful” and “excellent” firms and then gave advice that you could use to make your own firm “excellent”. (This has been subject to much subsequent criticism but it didn’t dent his success, nor that of McKinsey in their application of his findings). His basic book outline, showcasing various companies, telling their success story and then outlining what you, the thinking manager, could copy is now the de facto formula for most business books I have read. Today, the newer of these are telling us how we can be Facebook or Apple or Google or Amazon, if we but follow what they do. All the “secrets” behind their success. (Recently, however, there is a backlash against Big Tech…).
While I still have a stationery addiction (mostly under control), I now no longer believe in the power of a personal productivity secret to making me more productive. The only way for me to achieve what I want to achieve is to look to the horizon, figure out which point on it I would like to reach, and then start the hard work of doing a little paddling towards it each day. I suspect this is probably the secret sauce in most success, personal or corporate. There is no silver bullet, magic faraway tree or other huckster hocus-pocus on which individuals should rely. Once I thought there was a short cut. Now I like the idea of “the longcut“. I have found all that time I wasted on reading how other people did it could probably have been better spent on embarking on the journey, rather than reading the guidebooks. The advisory industry would probably disagree with me, though.