Grid Locked

My fifth grade teacher was a very meticulous man. His bookshelves were alphabetized, his chalk sorted by color, and his shoes always perfectly shined. Each of his students had his or her own desk that we were assigned to for the whole year. The desk would over time become a catch-all for outdated study guides, candy wrappers, broken pencils, and the like. But our teacher, being as orderly as he was, couldn't stand any sort of clutter. If he spotted you taking a moment too long to unearth a text book he would promptly come to your desk, ask you to step away, and would proceed to dump the entire contents on the floor at your feet. The rest of the class would cheer and holler at your misfortune, and you'd be forced to clean up the mess while attempting to simultaneously take notes on the French and Indian War. I was by far his most frequent victim.

To call me "organized" is to call a porcupine cuddly. Even my handwriting is chicken-scratch. I've gotten better over the years (my socks are now washed in pairs!), but I'm certainly not perfect (the pairs of socks are often mismatched). The few organizational skills I have mastered, though, have become invaluable to me.

My favorite newfound hyper-organized habit is this one:

Making a spreadsheet of destinations and attractions? Yeah, it doesn't get too much more meticulous than that. But I can't even express to you how helpful this was to us when we were on vacation. If we were running behind schedule and needed to know a restaurant's hours, I had their phone number. If we changed plans and decided to go to Rao's before the Farmer's Market instead of after, I had an address to navigate us to.

Dan and I have a bad habit, too, of planning our trips almost solely around food (mmm.... food!). While it's all well and good to explore the local food scene, it is not good to go from sandwich shop to cafe to candy store to bakery with nothing in between. That causes what Dan and I call "vacation belly". Ugh.

I categorized our stops into Food, Brande-things (like pottery), Dan-things (like hiking), Cafes, Shopping, and Grocery (we're odd and love getting groceries. It's at least as much fun as dinner and a movie to us). Seeing those little coded bullets next to each place name helped me make sure that we had a balanced trip planned.

Making the grid was super easy too. I just made a table in Microsoft Word, titled each column, and threw in the information. Easy peasy.

I hope you'll give this a try the next time you're out and about. Be sure to create one for each of the little townships around your destination as well! The one above is for Amherst, MA, but we had spreadsheets made for Turner's Falls, Deerfield, Northampton, Greenfield, and Shelburne Falls, too. We never ran out of stuff to do (or food to eat) and the whole trip was mishap free.

With Love,
~Brande N.