Every new year, seeking the ideal system to make order from chaos

Someday, the perfect planning system will change my life.

Perpetually overcommitted yet full of ideas for more exciting things to do, I am often running behind schedule and feeling overwhelmed. Rather than taking on fewer projects, I pursue the dream of the ideal system to make all the chaos fall in line, like obedient first-graders walking down the hall.

I’ve tried the Clarity Planner, the Happy Planner and numbered lists in a three-ring binder, each turn of the year or the season promising a new beginning. The Facebook algorithm reads my mind and feeds me a stream of ads for people just like me. “Tired of making resolutions that fizzle out? Try the 90-day reset!”

Over and over, I’ve tried a new technique, carefully filling in goals on clever habit trackers and planning tasks for each day of the week. And over and over I’d find the tidy little rectangles far too tiny to actually write in. Or I’d miss a day with the habit tracker — and give up.

As 2026 began and the house emptied of young adults home for the holidays, the reality hit me: I had only two months until the writing conference in March that two friends and I are organizing and less than four months until our son Ben’s wedding in April. That celebration called for preparing the house for an influx of guests, altering bridesmaids’ dresses, cleaning all the flower beds, moving fabric out of a guest room, and baking food for the freezer. In addition, my husband and I hoped to take a weeklong trip in February to a sunnier place, and the roses and apple trees needed pruning. The lists in my head lengthened by the minute.

Was I up to any of this, realistically, still in fresh grief over the sudden loss of our youngest son? My therapist chose her words carefully. “You have grief brain on top of ADHD and menopause brain, you know. That’s a lot.”

Yes, I knew that. But I felt compelled by a deep restlessness. The conference and the wedding would happen whether I was functional or not. I wanted to contribute meaningfully to both.

With my long history of impulsive beginnings and half-done projects, my therapist’s cautions were valid. But surely writing it all down on the right chart would organize it all: priorities, tasks, the house, the hobbies, the yard and the commitments and obligations.

This time, instead of a new notebook, I’d create the perfect goal chart, and it would change everything. I imagined a paper with big colorful rectangles breaking down into smaller and smaller boxes like a Lego creation disintegrating into individual bricks, symbols of big impossible tasks dividing into doable portions. My kids would come home for the wedding and be amazed at the well-prepared bedrooms free of draping cobwebs, the pantries free of expired food, and the flower beds free of grass and blackberry vines.

For hours, I lost myself in the vast generosity of Etsy, where pages of printable goal charts beckoned. And so inexpensive! But nothing was quite what I wanted.

All right, I would design my own — the right chart, the right colors, with boxes to fill in. First I sketched a big circle in the center for a big task, such as “clean the pantries.” That branched into four smaller boxes — “furnace room,” “freezer room,” and so on. And then each medium box became a column of smaller boxes: Box up the canning jars, defrost the old freezer, sweep the cobwebs.

The chart I drew looked very much like I drew it myself, so I messaged my daughter Jenny. “As the Canva Queen, how hard would it be to design a printable goal chart like this?”

That afternoon a file from Jenny appeared in my inbox. The chart was beautiful, each section in one of my favorite pastels and all the boxes big enough to write in. I printed off more and more copies as I thought of more and more big important tasks — cleaning upstairs! Writing projects! Flower beds!

I wrote madly, the colorful papers strewn around the kitchen like so many dahlia bouquets in September. Big projects divided into medium tasks and divided further into doable assignments.

Sewing projects! Sorting old photos! Planning trips! Rehearsal dinner! Messages to send! Guests to host! The perfect system, at last.

I taped the papers on kitchen cupboard doors and stuck them to a whiteboard with magnets, a frantic profusion of order and accomplishment and competence, as though thinking them through was the same as actually doing them.

The next day, I attacked the attic, organizing and sweeping in a frenzy of accomplishment. Then I crossed off the jobs on the chart with a highlighter, box after box. Next came the book room in the barn where all my inventory is stored, whipped into order and cleanliness.

One morning I got up and looked around my kitchen. Such an exhausting tsunami of lists. What was I thinking? Surely I had aimed far too high, and I was going to repeat my pattern yet again — wild planning followed by a disappointing inability to follow through.

On the phone, I told my daughter Emily I was like all the people who make New Year’s resolutions and don’t keep them.

“What does it matter if you run out of steam?” Emily asked. “Think about how much joy it brought you to do all this planning and write it on pretty papers. Maybe it’s worth it, just for that. And it helped you think about what needs to be done.”

What a healthy perspective!

I decided to let myself enjoy the process and be grateful for the boxes I crossed off. If I fell short of my grand goals, could I give myself grace?

Yes, I could. However, the year is still young, and I still think this might be the year when the perfect goal chart will miraculously change my life, one task and one pretty crossed-off rectangle at a time.