How to Organise Your Diary for 2024
The Rectory
St James the Least
January 2024
My Dear Nephew Darren,
So, you have just attended a course on ‘Diary Management’ to get you prepared for another year. If you had visited me, I could have told you all you need to know in half the time. Allow me to provide you with useful information which was probably not provided in your conference hand-outs.
First, buy the smallest diary you can find. Large blank pages only encourage you to fill them with too many appointments; the smaller the page, the easier it can be made to appear that your days are fully booked.
Second, make sure that it is of a size that will conveniently fit into any pocket. When dates are being arranged for subsequent meetings, you can theatrically start going through jacket, trouser and overcoat pockets. By the time you discover it was in your briefcase all along, all the dates will have been fixed and no one will notice you never got any of them.
Third, adopt your own private code for bookings. This means that any parishioner looking over your shoulder and seeing ‘1.30pm PLS’ or ‘7.30pm WTD’ will assume you are attending important church meetings. The fact that they mean ‘Post Lunch Sleep’ and ‘Walk the Dog’ will be known to you alone – although do have alternative possibilities for your acronyms should you ever be challenged. My congregation know I am assiduous in attending the ‘Pauline Letters Seminars’ and my membership of the ‘World Theology Directorate’ is of many years standing.
Fourth, record everything in pencil so that once you return home, you can rub most of it out and can then deny you knew anything about those meetings you were supposed to attend – and to prove it, you can show the blank page in your diary.
Fifth, put someone else’s address inside your diary. Should you ever have to resort to the ultimate act and need to lose it, you do not want some Good Samaritan returning it to you from the churchyard compost heap.
So, you see, your day of flip charts and group discussions were quite wasted – and I would gladly have presented my course for half their price.
Your Loving Uncle, Eustace
Feature Image:pexels-pixabay-99562, PD