Datebook Can Keep Your Life On Track All Year Long

A friend was showing off her new ultraslim engagement calendar for 1997 that can handily slip into a skirt pocket. It’s tasteful, trim and utterly useless.

I know this woman’s life. She’s chronically overbooked and a self-admitted “organizational mess.” Unless this is the year she decides to sleep through, her miniplanner will never be adequate, even if she writes small.

By the second week in January that petite datebook will be at the bottom of a briefcase jammed so full with backup reminders it will bulge like a diaper bag.

And that is the point. A proper-sized datebook can double as a briefcase. Along with noting crucial names and times, it can be a stuff-book for lists, magazine clips, speech notes and parking tickets. Put a rubber band around it, tote it from office to home to synchronize with dental appointments and neighborhood open houses and you have taken command.

I think I would sooner lose my purse than my datebook. You can replace credit cards and lip gloss but a datebook keeps your life on track, of what’s coming, and just as important, what’s been.

Besides, if you use it to its full potential it becomes a journal, full of jottings and doodles, notes to yourself, last night’s dream, a reminder to find the video with Holly Hunter and Gena Rowlands, whose turn it is to buy lunch, whom you owe stamps to, which sauvignon blanc doesn’t give migraines and the hay fever pills that Helen uses.

It’s message central, a repository for the notes you carry in your pockets, the computer memos to yourself, the stick-on notes on the bathroom mirror, the naggers on the refrigerator door. By the end of the year everything that you once thought you needed to note in the last 12 months is there.

Now is the time when we transfer the stuff from one year into the next year’s book - and you thought there was nothing exciting to do on New Year’s.

These are big decisions, figuring out what to carry aboard and what to leave behind. The business card of a woman who leads hikes to Nepal. The 35 most erotic movies of all time, developed by a giggly group one midnight after lots of wine. A reminder from last summer to never call one friend on Thursdays because she gets edgy on deadline.

Some people plan their life with a little computer planner. Suggest dinner and they’ll beep in a code to see when they might have a window big enough to let you in. Others carry around those organizers shaped like a large meat loaf, categorized by such things as Goals and Projects, demonstrating that tightly scheduled sometimes gets confused with self-important.

I like the picture datebooks. On one side, spaces for Monday through Sunday and on the other, photos of some get-away world I can dream about when I’m on hold.

I also have a desk calendar that is good for a month at a glance. Mostly I use it to eat pizza bagels on. The other day I discovered it still said October and scrawled on it was the name of an Asian market that sells an ant repellent. Plus the blood pressure numbers from my last physical. Both will be moved into the book of essentials for 1997.