PARTING SHOT

Perhaps it started when I read my thirty-eighth wealthy young entrepreneur saga in Money, Working Woman, Savvy, or I’m Rich, the most galling of the genre. A Harvard MBA makes a million with an answering machine for car phones. Two Phoenix dance instructors shock the world with white wine yogurt. Every I’m Rich profile gives me yet another reason to feel downwardly immobile. The chief gauge of success for such people seems to be: make sure the first two digits of your salary exceed both your age and waist size by at least fifteen. I’m at three and slipping.

Then at lunch one day, my friend opened her five-pound Day Timer organizer to check her little Dow Jones ticker tape machine. I happened to see her schedule for a Friday: on that page were more plans than I have for my entire life. One entry caught my eye: 5:45-consider merits of various long-distance services re: upcoming decision.

That was it. Crushed, alone in a world of relentless organizers, I had hit rock bottom. It was time to get organized. I fished a crumpled bar napkin from my pocket and saw to my horror that I had listed just two items under “Goals and Objectives for 1986.” Get IRS extension. Buy Springsteen tape. What kind of plans were those?

So that’s why I ordered the Last Chance Time Management course through an ad in one of the magazines. Sure, $350 for a cassette tape, four workbooks, and two schedule pads seemed a bit steep, but the success literature had warned me that such niggling qualms were part of the Fear of Success Syndrome that had made me accept mediocrity as my lot in life. Go-getting entrepreneurs wrestled adversity into big bucks all the time, Why couldn’t I?

The LCTM course started out with a challenge. I was to keep a log book for a week, a complete record of everything I did. How else to know where those precious hours go? Feeling like a one-minute manager already, I determined to kill two birds with one stone and listen to the tape while keeping the log. No moment would go unmanaged.

12:15-start tape. Meet Tom and Mary, two busy executives who will take the course with me. Wonder where I have heard narrator’s voice before. 12:17- writer in next cubicle complains about tape noise. Grope in desk for little earplug thing for recorder. Find lost staple remover. Find odd blue bristly brush-toothbrush for a beaver?-with IBM logo on back. Remember that business editor borrowed earplug thing a month ago; must have kept it. 12:25-start memo to publisher re: idiocy of cubicles; impossibility of decent work therein. 12:41-start tape again with volume very low. Bend over desk to hear tiny mosquito voice hum, “Most of us want to feel we’re in charge of our time-” interrupted by managing editor asking why I am bent double. Did I eat in the building cafeteria? We exchange cafeteria jokes for 200th time. 12:52-empty entire contents of desk drawer on floor. No earplug thing. Find receipt from expensive interview/lunch last year. Wonder if it’s too late to get reimbursed.

1:00-make list of pop songs with “time” in title: time in a bottle, won’t let me, on my side, of the season. Wonder if Lee Iaccoca has trouble concentrating. Back to tape. Tom and Mary are practicing saying “no” to people who infringe on their time. Narrator is encouraging them. I decide that narrator is the same oppressively cheerful voice from ninth-grade science films. (“Professor Snibley, what is a molecule?”) 1:10-three co-workers camp outside my cubicle putting together combination bicycle-lawnmower for photograph. Loud argument re: placement of handlebars. I give up and decide to tackle LCTM workbook, starting with a few hundred statements designed to reveal my time management problems.

I actively discourage drop-in visitors. Great idea! Anyway, (his passive discouragement is not working. Last week a freelancer dropped in to pitch a story on hard times in the linseed oil business. I lay perfectly still on the floor, feigning a stroke, but he droned on for ten minutes, then stepped over me and left.

To stop procrastinating, I do all the unpleasant tasks at once. Wait a minute, now. Have you ever tried to figure a tax deduction for one-eighth of a home office heating bill while shopping for molly bolts and washing your car? I’d like to see it.

I’d rather do something myself than supervise someone else doing it. Right on. Especially procrastinating. I’d much rather put something off myself than delegate someone to put it off for me. If you want something put off that will stay put off, you’d better do it yourself.

I tend to lose sight of my objectives if lam interrupted by a crisis. Okay, this has been a problem, but I’m getting on top of it. During the past month Marcos fled the Philippines, the Sandinistas invaded Honduras, and we gave Khadaffy what for. Did I get involved? Not on your life. Not one trip to Washington did I make. Sorry, I have no suggestions as to where Mr. Marcos might live next. We have people who get paid for thinking about these things. I’m busy.

I don’t go to meetings unless my presence is really necessary. Ouch. This one really cuts to the quick, but I’m going to face this thing as an executive should. Why do I feel I have to go to every blasted meeting? Last month at the VFW post I had to confess I wasn’t even a veteran. And I’m pretty sure that the bank directors are starting to wonder who I am. Resolved: attend only meetings in the Dallas area.

I realize that sometimes the best solution to a problem is to do nothing at all. Hey, they’re reading my mind on this one. I’ve learned to do nothing for weeks at a time, just watching a problem, circling around it and sizing it up, ready to pounce and slap a solution on that dude. I’m aware that to the untrained eye-or to the wastrel unacquainted with the Last Chance Time Management course-such problem-solving tactics look dangerously like loafing. I could explain the difference, and I will. Soon. Just let me make myself a note on this napkin.