I threw away my Franklin Planner this week. Mine was old school, pre Franklin Covey merger. Fresh out of college, I remember receiving my first Franklin Planner and going through the day-long training.
Towards the end of the class, our instructor had us go out 21 days and add the task of sending her a note (not an email, an actual paper note) describing how our first three weeks using the planner were going. A colleague I worked with who was 20+ years my senior flipped his planner to the next day and began writing more immediate tasks he planned to accomplish back in the office. I asked him why he didn't do the exercise as instructed, and he said, "I have no intention of sending her a note."
I admired his thought process, and while that incident has stuck with me all these years, I still struggle with being selective on what actually gets added to my Omnifocus inbox.
I remember upgrading my planner from burgundy plastic to navy blue leather, but it's been years since I've ordered a refill or used any form of a paper task manager or calendar. I still see others who do, but they are becoming more rare every year. I've moved my old planner from office to office clinging to it like a security blanket, but as I packed for an my next move it was time to let it go.
I'm lucky I got to spend some time with it saying goodbye. I paged through it and kept some of the insides, the most important being my mission statement - written in 1993, printed on a dot matrix printer, and signed by Stephen R. Covey in 2003. I was pleasantly pleased to discover how much in alignment I've been living what I wrote 21 years ago. Not achieved it, but living it.
I retyped my mission statement in nvALT in it's original form, resisting the urge to tighten it up and remove a few cliques, and I took a picture of it to store in Evernote.
I also found this little gem - a poem from Rumi via Gordon MacKenzie's Orbiting the Giant Hairball. It seemed like a perfect summary of this transition of letting go.