Trying to Be Organised

As time goes on one tends to attract responsibilities, memberships of various boards and committees, which stick to one rather like mud sticks to the boots, until eventually the mud is so thick you can't move your feet. All of these tasks generate an astonishing amount of paperwork.

A couple of times recently I have been reduced to near-tears by considering the amount there is to do and the strictly limited time there is in which to do it, if one is not to go mad. I sat not very long ago at a meeting of the board of governors of the infant school. Time was when being a school governor was a matter of turning up for a meeting once a term or so and smiling benignly while the head teacher told you how splendidly it was all going. Those days are long since past, and now governors are expected to be 'critical friends' to the school, and if they are not seen to be sufficiently critical, and able to demonstrate it, OfStEd will want to know why. Anyway, this particular meeting saw me in a bad enough mood to start with having managed somehow to mislay all the paperwork I know I printed when the clerk to the governors sent it to me. Of course you only discover this kind of thing with moments to go before you have to leave for the meeting, whatever it is. I've tried, I really have tried, to get my head around school and what happens in it, and have attempted to set time aside to read all the masses of bumf that gets sent down from the DofE and its intermediaries, but I can't manage it. After three and a half years it remains nearly as impenetrable as when I started, and I barely ever think of any contribution to the meetings which nobody else comes up with first. School is not the only category of meeting for which this holds true, either.

So I have determined two things. I will no longer print paperwork, or receive it through the post, and then keep it in a pile on the desk until the event or meeting to which it's relevant comes up, after which it then gets filed; I will file it first in the appropriate place, and then, in theory, I'll know where it is. Secondly, for a meeting I'm not actually chairing I will set an appropriate time to leave, warn the chair that I will do so, and then go at that point so avoiding the stress of fretting about how long it will go on, when will be an acceptable time to go, is it worth going or staying, and so on.

You may think this is all petty. But this is the stuff of which the Kingdom is made. I don't think.