On Holidays and Cleaning and Planning

Jean Sexton muses:

There are times I envy my mother. She has to be the most organized person I know. Her calendar is always full of penciled-in notes. ("Other people's plans may change," she explained to me when I was young, "and I'll need to change the note.") Everything has a place and (if she has her way) everything is in its place. Even decorations and such live in a particular spot. For once, my decorations are organized (well, sort of). Right now, most of them are in storage except for a few plants that I've bought to brighten things and except for the decorations at work. My mother would be pleased.

I'm making decisions for the holidays, including who gets my office decorations. They won't suffice for the area that I will have at ADB and I will have a front window that will need to look professional, so most of the existing decorations need a new home. My office plants will not travel to Texas (especially the nine-foot-tall dragon tree that I got over 30 years ago), so someone needs to love them. The ceramic Christmas tree I made for my grandmother will go to Texas. The wooden snowman she made me along with a small tree have already been mailed to Amarillo for this holiday. As I clean out my office and the place I am living, I am making decisions about what to keep and what will go with me. The choices are hard for me. So many things hold memories of my parents and grandparents. I've decided that some things will go to dear friends along with the stories of how they came to me. Then the things will make someone else happy and new memories will be created with them. The rest I will organize somehow when I get to Amarillo.

I struggle with organization. I seem to have inherited from my father the tendency to set things down and not get them where they belong (except for the flyswatter that must live on the refrigerator so I may murder spiders and wasps that wander into the house). The only way I can seem to manage to pretend to be organized is to plan. I learned some tricks from Mom -- start at the due date and work backwards. I'm cleaning up old emails at work prior to my leaving, so I divided the number I had by the months I would have to work on them and I delete that many each month. I've looked at the stuff in my office and I am dealing with five of them each week. Slowly my office empties and my emails vanish into email heaven.

I know that SVC is looking to me to keep him organized and ADB on track. He wants me to do marketing and that requires planning. To that end, I found a monthly planner and that will let me see key dates at a glance. I can also back up from release dates and plan to release an announcement two weeks before we get a product in house and then email a Star Fleet Alert when it is available for "pre-order" (i.e., when it is in-house). Trickier will be the alerts both to the retailers that they should order it from the distributor and to the distributors letting them know it is coming out. There's also the publicity that goes with that. I'll also need to have a list of websites to make our announcements on (and their posting policies). I'll need to contact prominent reviewers and bloggers with whom I hope I can build good relations and see if they can work in a mention/review of our new "thing." All of that requires planning so that I have things ready to pop on the correct day without suddenly thinking, "Oh, BAD WORD! I forgot that SFB Module X15, Captain's Log #123, Federation Commander Xorkalians Attack!, and the Prime Directive Xorkalian Sourcebook are coming out today and I need to contact EVERYONE with the news! Even worse, I have to write the news!!! AAAAAACCCCKKKKKK!!!!!"

I have faith that I will meet the challenge.