Why Buffaloes are Never Late

You don’t see them very often here in Saipan, but it’s hard to imagine anyone in the mainland being without a Day-Timer. Day-Timer (a brand name) is sometimes used generically to describe those small, notebook style planning books where you pencil in appointments, keep important phone numbers, and stash a few business cards.

Indeed, Californian that I am, my Coach planner– made, of all things, of water buffalo hide (?!)– has been a companion for well over a decade. It’s a veteran of many stale offices and power lunches, and it’s also been dragged from the remote expanses of the Alaskan bush, to Panama, to the outback of Borneo; I simply can’t live without the thing. I still haven’t solved the water buffalo angle, but I noticed in Borneo that they never seemed to be late for important meetings. Aha! Maybe we’re on to something here.

The big idea (or the false promise, take your pick) behind the Day-Timer approach is that they’ll make you organized. Which, of course, is like saying that having a computer on your desk will make you smart. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but, let’s face it, mere hardware can’t cure the terminally disorganized.

My theory is this: Day Timers will not make you more organized overall, but they can help you organize the really important things (meetings, your wife’s birthday, your girlfriends’s next body- piercing appointment, etc.) and life-or-death phone numbers (the Psychic Hotline is at the top of my list). The secret is to remain just organized enough so that you can always find your Day- Timer when you need it.

Are you disorganized? Who better to gauge that than the Day-Timer folks? I offer, then, five questions they ran in a magazine ad a few years ago:

Question 1: “Have you ever gone through the garbage to find important numbers?”

My answer: “Dude, I’ve gone through the SHREDDER output to find important numbers.”

Question 2: “Do little notes and stickies pile up all over your office?”

My answer: “My computer is so covered with yellow stickies that it looks like Big Bird.”

You will note that the little yellow stickies haven’t been around all that long, maybe, what, 15 years or so? 20, tops. We can’t live without them, yet have they helped us become more organized? Or have they been a crutch for the disorganized? Perhaps they even make the problem worse.

Question 3: “Have you ever spent 20 minutes looking for a phone number to make a two-minute call?

My answer: “Yes! It once took me an hour to find the phone number for 911.”

In fact, I spend an hour a week looking for phone numbers, on average. I have sort of a triage approach to phone numbers. Important numbers go into my Coach planner. Not-so-important numbers go onto an index card–usually. (The index cards are scattered at random in about nine different places, though.) Business cards from folks are the real bugaboo–there is simply no elegant way to keep and organize them. They’ve actually got little electronic gizmos that you feed business cards into and they scan the information, and, presto, you’ve now compounded the original problem with frivolous technology, and haven’t solved a thing.

Moving right along, here are the last two questions of the quiz. They’re great, you’ll get a real laugh out of them–oh, wait a sec–darn, I lost the magazine. Where is it? It’s undoubtedly hiding in one of several unkempt piles of stuff on my desk. I’ll check the shredder tomorrow, though, just in case.