Some people journal. I Daytimer.

When I started getting actual W2 work as a contract software developer (as opposed to freelance work for pay I did initially for one of the GLIB admins) I began keeping a work diary on planner pages I initially bought at an office supply store. Those are the small three ring binders at the left. One of those is just a bunch of free form notes about my work on the BGE Home work measurement system.

Later I discovered DayTimer’s 24 hour two page per day planner and that worked for me LOTS better than the Franklin-Covey business day only Planner (because Highly Effective People only work business hours I reckon). A software engineer’s work is almost never just nine to five, and there were times while I was working on James Webb that I pulled some overnights.

(Sometime around then I started a New Yorker-ish cartoon I was going to submit to Christopher Street showing two guys on a first date sitting across the table from each other at an outdoor bistro, and one is saying to the other “I’m sorry hon, but it won’t work. You’re Franklin Planner and I’m DayTimer” But then Christopher Street went belly up…)

Then, just before I retired, DayTimer got bought out and the 24 hour two page per day desktop refills became lost in the mists of time and the new company’s business model. I was really PO’d, but eventually accepted an almost as good but only barely good enough substitute. I keep complaining about it on the new company’s website. They’re actually Still making the pocket size wirebound 24 hour two page per day planners but those don’t work for me.

Anyway…I keep my planners because I’m weird about things like that, and sometimes you need to have that paper time machine.

So I’m trying to tidy things up at Casa del Garrett (east) in anticipation of a very dear friend coming for a short visit, and I wanted to organize these a bit better. What you see in this photo compasses my entire working life as a (W2) software developer/engineer.

You can see where I was storing them on their sides under the bookshelves and dust accumulated. I’ll be tackling that with the Kirby later.

I was browsing through the old pre-Daytimer entries when I found the day in 1994 I put a deposit down on the last and best apartment I ever lived in, and a bunch of work I did for BGE Home when they were transitioning away from paper timesheets to a mobile data terminal system. There are repeated entries about a batch editor that I had to think about for a moment to remember what exactly it did (it processed the field tech’s digital timesheets to make them ready for ingest into the work measurement system). I see in there a problem I had to address when timesheets crossed day boundaries and the system wasn’t picking up on the fact that the tech was still on overtime after midnight.

One little corner of my life…