I landed my first executive position in 1995. I’ll never forget it - I worked as the Director of Marketing for a Dallas-based telemarketing company.

In truth, I was promoted into the position because the president of the company wanted to get new clients, we only had about 16 workstations at the time, and I was the best candidate he could pull from his call center to bring in new sales.

The “Director of Marketing” title was, at best, a ruse to make the people I’d be talking to think they were dealing with someone important within our company. Initially, everything I pulled in that was at all promising, was handed off to the company president who would close the deal.

Well, after playing lead-gen-boy-wearing-executive-hat for about two months, I decided that I wasn’t going to kick all the deals I found over to the president any more. Why should he have all the fun when I could take them all the way through negotiation to close and just bring him in to sign the contract in the end.

My plan worked perfectly - I immediately landed a contract to conduct customer satisfaction surveys for Greyhound, our biggest project to date. The president recognized what I’d done, patted me on the back, and stepped out of the way. I forged ahead and quickly identified several other strong clients and helped the company double, triple, and quadruple it’s number of contracted monthly hours. From there, I was able to transition into a position with a Utah-based Internet company and I’ve been an Internet marketing executive ever since. All because my plan worked perfectly.

My plan . . . what was my plan really? Actually, did I even have a plan? No. All I had was a job.

I stated out making $8/hr plus bonuses working in a pretty pathetic call center where we dialed manually and tried to find locations for gumball machines. I had no plan to become a marketing executive, all I knew is that I needed a job and the opportunity presented itself. I wasn’t even on the phones for long (just a couple of weeks) before I was promoted.

I had no plan for world domination at that point, and it seems it’d didn’t even matter.

Well, as my career progressed and I moved to Utah to jump into Internet technology, I started to notice that everyone around me pulled together all these careful little plans. Franklin planners were all the rage and Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits echoed through the halls of every place I worked.

I confess. I bought into the whole thing. I spent my $100 and bought a Franklin planner. I put first things first, read the books, sharpened my saw, and got organized.

The only problem was that all the planning got in my way. Plus I felt bad about myself every time I deviated even an inch from my priorities. I obviously couldn’t focus.

I decided the problem must be the planner. It just wasn’t the right solution for me . . .

I bought a HandSpring (remember those?) - a PDA that ran the Palm OS. The HandSpring was going to answer all my problems. I set it up, learned to write in Graffiti and proceeded to carry the thing with me for about a month.

The same thing happened again, my HandSpring brought me no joy - I didn’t even find pleasure in the games I’d downloaded and installed (a plus my Franklin planner hadn’t had). The, one day, the batteries ran out and I never charged them again.

Franklin and Covey merged and I moved to New York. It seemed that, in new york, no one really planned. Microsoft Outlook had finally progressed to the point where it offered a number of planning features. I built to-do lists and scheduled recurring events. Deadlines came and went. I kept hitting remind-me-later on taskes that were months overdue.

Later, I ended up back in Utah and married the girl of my dreams (not Meg Ryan - I lost all respect for her after she left Dennis). We reached a point where we were both working and had coordinate our schedules. So, I did what anyone who’d had multiple failed experiences with planning systems . . . I spent $150 on a new Franklin-Covey planner.

I spent a weekend working to coordinate everyting. Wrote in a million events and promptly never opened it again.

A year later, I bought a new PDA - a Palm LifeDrive. It integrated with Outlook, offered wireless Web access, and even connected to millions of Bluetooth devices I didn’t own.

Guess where the LifeDrive is right now? Your guess is as good as mine. I lost the charger a year ago and haven’t turned the darn thing off since.

Which brings me, at long last, to my point.

My career has continued to grow, my relationship gets better every day, my one-year-old boy walks, talks, and does tricks. There’s very little I’d change about my life, and none of those things could be fixed with more efficient planning - well, maybe they could, but I’m tired of sinking money into planning systems that I never plan to use.

Maybe you’re different from me. Maybe you want to get your life all organized. If so, here are a couple of links to major providers of planning systems and tools. I get a commission if you buy things from them, so, have fun. May you plan to fail as well as I have.

Save 15% on New Day Planner Packages at FranklinCovey.com

Buy used and refurbished handhelds at the Official Palm Store Factory Outlet at up to 25% off!