Pens for Different Purposes

Being from an era when pharmaceutical representatives made a point of leaving me with a pen with their drug's logo at each encounter, I never became attached to individual pens, other than a few Cross Pens given to me as gifts or my father's ink pen and pencil set that I inherited. Those all stay in a drawer.  Over the years, though, I've focused more on daily and weekly planning where I've color coded my intents by categories.  What began as a Bic 4-color pen that I kept in the leather mini-loop of my Franklin Planner has expanded to something much more elaborate, further entrenched as a ritual as I established My Space.  My desktop now has a variety of pens allocated to specific purposes.

Daily planning takes place over four sets.  Three are kept in what is effectively a planning bag.  The colors are Black=ordinary activities, Green=professional activities, Red=family or finance, Blue=House, Purple=Notes for each activity.  I have two sets of Bic stick pens.  Black and purple are constant but red, green, and blue come in both bold and pastel shade.  I use either all bold or all pastel.  In the same black nylon bag I keep a set of Dollar Store color retractables of the same colors. I use either all stick or all retractable.  I've had other series, Flair pens that are too broad to put on my limited page and wonderful Magna Tank gel pens that Walmart used to sell.  These had a tendency to leak but vivid colors and a somewhat heftier barrel.  They are no longer suitable as I now use a highlighter for those activities that are part of my semiannual plan.  The gel pens smear with the highlighter.  And next to my desk, I keep a blue and black stick pen at my right hand and a green and red stick pen in a cup to my right with a picture of Honest Abe that I got from his museum in Springfield.  I use that set on occasion, maybe once or twice a week, omitting purple.

Behind the black nylon pen case I keep two marble notebooks.  The gray one gets filled out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays after the evening planning session noting my weight, waist circumference, BP, treadmill attainments and comments about how I slept or felt that past week.  The orange one gets filled out most days with a gel pen rotating from red, blue, black from the Dollar Store.  I call that Hakaras HaTov, three items during the day that went well.  Those pens have a short life span, pretty much depleting over just a few months.  I won't replace them.  Magna Tank would have been ideal for this had they made a better product.

None of this changes my productivity, but reinforces a need for ritual and recognition.  I retain enough variability to require a decision on which set each evening along with a commitment to use the set that I have chosen.  Those few minutes thinking about how I did the previous day and what I expect of myself tomorrow have become a daily destination with ritual objects, however trivial, dedicated to what is among the most important of my daily tasks.