The Bespectacled Girl has a rather unusual hobby.
She likes organising things. Excessively.
No, not her cupboards or drawers.
Her life.
For most people, unwinding looks like watching a movie, taking a nap, or meeting friends. But for her, it is to tinker around with her productivity app. She calls it “relaxing” and “therapeutic.”
She has spent years looking out for THE PERFECT APP that can organise every tiny aspect of her life.
Tasks. Books. Finances. Workouts. Recipes. Travel plans. Checklists. Shopping lists. Reminders. Habits. Mood. Sleep.
And then, one fine day, after years of downloading, deleting, reinstalling, comparing, and watching productivity videos she absolutely did not need…
She found it.
The App.
She stared at the logo the way people in romantic films stare at the love of their lives.
She had found The One.
She somehow even found a way to create a database to track her dust allergies, as though she were preparing a detailed quarterly report for the World Health Organisation.
Somehow, she has found a way to organise every single thing, whether it is required to be organised in the first place is out of the question.
She goes the extra mile. She spends entire evenings looking for the perfect icons, cover images and colour themes for EVERY SINGLE database she has created.
She firmly believes that choosing the correct icon is one of the most important decisions she can make.
Should the icon on her reading list be a stack of books, or a bookmark, or perhaps a pair of spectacles? She spends hours just to decide this, as if choosing any other icon would automatically change her reading list to something completely different.
Her obsession with organising does not end with finding productivity apps. Somewhere on her shelf sits a rather elaborate collection of journals and notebooks. Each one has already been assigned a specific purpose.
“This one is for when I start travelling.”
“This one is for collecting recipes.”
“This one is for the book that I will eventually write.”
A decade later, all of them remain beautifully blank. The notebooks seem to be waiting patiently and optimistically for the day they could finally do what they were supposed to do. They convince themselves that their futures are secure. The future, unfortunately, keeps getting postponed indefinitely.
For The Bespectacled Girl, every Sunday means another sacred ritual: The Weekly Decluttering Session.
You guessed it right. This has its own checklist too, categorised, of course.
She dusts surfaces that aren’t dusty. She reorganises things already organised. She folds things that were already folded. She checks off every single item with immense satisfaction.
Skipping the tasks because they simply don’t need to be done has never crossed her mind.
She does this not because anyone would notice or expect. She does it because she expects it of herself.
Even if she is tired. Even if she feels lazy.
Missing one week’s decluttering session feels illegal to her.
Her life plans are equally ambitious, and unsurprisingly, they have their own database too. She has mapped out goals until the age of one hundred. Every goal has a target year.
It is almost as if eighty-eight-year-old The Bespectacled Girl already knows what her life is supposed to look like.
Reality, however, is not as organised as it seems.
Every morning, she creates a to-do list containing seventeen carefully categorised tasks spread across approximately thirty-nine different areas of life, which make sense only to her.
By bedtime, she has completed four of them.
And instead of thinking as a person normally would and rearranging her schedule, she creates another tracker to analyse why she completed only four tasks.
And spends another hour finding the perfect icon for this tracker.
Despite all this, The Bespectacled Girl still chooses to open the same app every single day to plan and structure her day.
Whether the day actually goes according to plan is not relevant.
The productivity app knows better.
More Adventures of The Bespectacled Girl
- The Bespectacled Girl and Her Overpacked Tote Bag (TBG #1)
- The Bespectacled Girl and Her Culinary Adventures (TBG #2)
- The Bespectacled Girl and Her Stationery Problem (TBG #3)
- The Bespectacled Girl and Her Clumsy Fingers (TBG #4)
- The Bespectacled Girl and Her Constant Need to Read (TBG #5)
Follow along as The Bespectacled Girl continues collecting stories, stationery, tote bags, and entirely avoidable problems.
Before you go…
If you’re looking for your next read, don’t forget to visit Books I Love, where I’ve gathered some of my favourite books and why they mean so much to me.
You can also find me on Instagram at @thesoulfulnib, where I share books, blog updates, and little moments from everyday life.
Until next time,
The Soulful Nib
The Soulful Nib 