All the About
My name is KimBoo York and I am neurodivergent. I also work professionally in accessibility services (formerly disability services) in higher education at the university level. I truly believe that the Deck of Life was born out of the years of experience trying to force myself to follow “simple” time management systems, and years of working with neurodivergent students trying to do the same.
I wanted a system that would allow flexibility, creativity, and a spicy dash of randomness to help shape my days, without costing me time and energy just to keep it up to date. I never could find that One Perfect Planner that would do the job. One day after talking with friends about all the planners we buy and never use for more than a week, I was walking my dog and thought: “I’d love to just have a deck of cards to pick my daily assignment of tasks from.”
Stunned by the thought, I stood on that street corner (to my dog’s confusion) for several minutes. That is how the Deck of Life was born!
If you’d like to know more about me, though, keep reading!
tl;dr you have been warned!
My issues are PTSD and clinical anxiety, but it’s possible I was autistic as a child. That last was never diagnosed, but I was a child way back in the 1970s when there was still a lot of mystery and ignorance around autism and, honestly, most mental illnesses/disorders.
I should know, because my mother was bipolar and my father an alcoholic.
Due to unspecified “maladaptive tendencies” in kindergarten and 1st grade, by the time 2nd grade started I was an utter disaster in school. Unable (and to a certain extent, unwilling) to make me behave “normally” they pulled me out and homeschooled me. But not just any old homeschool, no, Mother went straight for unschooling: no schedule, no curriculum, no timeline of progress. And that’s how I “graduated” high school.
The result of that combination of parents with mental disorders and unschooling was that I was not raised with calendars or reliable schedules in place. Friends would talk about doing the vacuuming every Saturday, or doing homework before dinner, or planning out their summer reading schedule, and I thought it was so very exotic.
The lack of structure in my life ironically made me fascinated with schedules and planners. As I grew up, I became obsessed with “personal organizer” planners (the new hot thing in 1980!), and always had one with me. In the era before smart phones it was a way to keep contacts, critical information, and schedules all in one place. I loved my day planner but the irony is that I rarely managed to use as a planner for my days.
Nothing has changed for me as an adult: I love planners, but I don’t use them as intended, if at all. I love the idea of them, the belief that I could straighten out my complex, difficult brain if I just found a weekly planner that worked for me.
I’m old enough to have worked my way through many different planners and schedulers and task management software programs and to-do list apps. There are dozens of time management methods out there (GTD, kanban, Start Finishing, time blocking, the Eisenhower Matrix, etc. etc.) and I’ve tried them all.
Bullet journals sprang on-scene and once I figured out it is just a blank journal you configure as you like, as you use it, I picked that up. The flexibility of it appealed to me, as did the fact that I could change how I used it as I went along. I wasn’t stuck in boxes or dates or tables. Still, I still didn’t commit to things like weekly spreads or monthly tracking even if I kept flirting with them.
Honestly? Most of those methods and planners work very well. The secret to using them successfully isn’t the specific method you use, it is using that method consistently and devotedly.
But I realized one day that the “problem” was not the planner or the method or the app. It’s me. I don’t think like that. I don’t work like that.
It took me years to figure it out.
It took me more years to figure out WHY.
It took a few false starts with the Bullet Journal system of planning followed by some very deep soul searching before I realized that my main problem with most “systems” is boredom.
I looked around and asked around and discovered that a lot of my friends suffered the same issue. Once I dug down into their reasons for abandoning one planner or system after another, it was always some version of becoming bored with it.
They were not bored of the tasks they had to do or the projects they were working on — admittedly, doing the laundry every weekend is not exciting! But many people do it, along with grocery shopping and filling out their budget. No, they were bored of the planner, the system, the relentless drudgery of making plans repeatedly. Bored of work that was not the work that needed to be done. It was easier to ditch the planner after a couple of months and go back to lists on post-it notes or alarm clock reminders.
Then there are the people with genuine executive functioning issues due to ADHD or depression or chronic health issues. All the planning systems and task management apps are all geared to normies. If your “spoons” vary by the day or the hour, having a perfectly structured to-do list or beautifully laid out planner is pointless, and eventually even worse than pointless as it become a psychological drag on your day-to-day existence.
The BuJo system is the closest most of us have found to something that works, but even then, many of us get sucked into the idea that we have to repeat layouts/lists, or do extensive tracking, for it to “help”.
And so the cycle repeats itself.
[tbc]