The cognitive dysfunction of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, frequently called fibro fog or brain fog, can make it seem impossible to stay on top of schedules. Organization takes a good short-term memory, and that’s something many of us simply can't rely on.
Because life keeps happening in spite of our illness, we have to have something other than our brains to keep us on top of things. Organizational aids like wall calendars and electronic schedulers can fill that role for you.
Even if your illness has forced your life to become pretty simple, you still likely have doctor's appointments to get to, prescriptions to refill, groceries to buy and other mundane tasks to accomplish. If you don't have an organizational system, it's easy to schedule things on top of each other or end up with too much planned for one day. You know what happens then – a crash that takes days or weeks to recover from.
Types of Organization
The type of schedule organization that will work best for you depends a lot on your lifestyle. Do you work outside the home or are you home most of the time? Do you live on your computer or rarely log on?
Let's start with the old-fashioned kind: a calendar. Having a calendar wherever you'll see it every day can really help. You might need to leave yourself reminders to fill it out, but if you work at it for a while it'll become a habit (even with brain fog). You'll also want to try getting into the habit of checking it at least once a day. The more often you see, for instance, that you have an appointment Thursday at 2:30, the more likely you are to remember it.
Most of us have a cell phone, which means we can put all of the information from the wall calendar into the electronic one and carry it with us. (Even the most basic phones have calendars these days.) That makes scheduling follow-up appointments a lot easier. You can also set reminders to go off a certain period of time before an appointment in case you do forget.
Worried about forgetting to transfer information from the calendar to the phone, or vise versa? Set a weekly appointment on your phone to reconcile them.
If you're like me and you spend a good chunk of time on the computer, you've got a lot of options. What works for me is having an iGoogle home page with multiple organizational applications -- a calendar for appointments and events; a to-do list of household projects; a birthday calendar; a list of gift ideas for different people; and an amazing daily scheduler that holds absolutely everything I need to do for work and around the house plus everything that's on my calendar. That way, I can spot different kinds of conflicts.
If you have a smart phone, you'll automatically have all of this information with you. If not, you'll still need to sit down with your phone (and possibly wall calendar) to make sure all the pertinent information is where you need it.
I look ahead at my schedule frequently to make sure I spot problems and identify times that I just have too much going on. A child's birthday party and grocery shopping on the same day? The sensory overload would land me in bed for days! A heavy writing day after an evening with friends? Nope -- my brain won't be up to it.
This might sounds crazy or obsessive to "normal" people, who can usually remember why they walked into a particular room, but for me it's an absolute necessity. Without these organizational aids I'd be lost and nothing would get done.
It does take time and effort to get everything established and into the habit of utilizing it, but it's worth it to get rid of the panic that can set in when you realize you were supposed to be somewhere an hour ago.
