Diaries and bring forward folders.

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

I am talking here about the ones in which you keep appointments not the storytelling ones that politicians publish years later to blacken the name of their colleagues and excuse themselves from blame.

All my working life, I managed with just a pocket diary and never felt the need for more. From 1987 when I first had a secretary, they kept desk diaries but such things had no appeal to me. Too big and another thing to write up. Never felt the need for a Filofax, a palm top or any of the trillion organisers you can get for a PC. I did use one of those pocket organisers but only for phone numbers and addresses because it saved writing them up in the diary each year.

Now my memory isn't perfect so back in 1966, I took some sheets of thin cardboard and taped them together and numbered the pockets from 1 to 31. Yes, I know you can buy them as bring forward folders these days but at that time, they were unknown, at least to all those around me. It helped me enormously in my job back then. I received a lot of technical queries from customers and had to pass them on to the labs who took their time to answer, if at all. So I took to phoning them and asking when they would answer. Well they quickly realised that on the due date, they would get another call and then be harrassed. So soon I got pretty much everything on time.

Two lessons in all this - one is the good old, 'Keep it simple, stupid!' and the second is that if you make the pain of doing a job badly greater than the pain of doing it well, then you will get results.