Pete, you're not alone! I have always been like this. My husband just says I am very organized. I don't know, if I don't put it down I panic. It has to be written down then Iam ok. I have my life in my Blackberry...literally!

I'm sure there are others like us!!!

Me too. On an aptitude test in 8th grade, I think I came in at the 14th percentile for secretarial skills. Later on, the a BS in Econ under my belt, and having made up most of the 13 incompletes I had picked up along the way, I went to law school with the idea of going into regulatory law, not knowing that a year after I started Ronald Reagan would be elected and I was hit by the tsunami of deregulation. Finally, in an attempt to preserve my fast eroding undergraduate education in econ, I chose bankruptcy, because a number of the older appellate decisions in corporate reorganization had relied on some of the more fairly sophisticated economic models of their day.

I only passed the CA bar because it was the very last time it was administered without a "performance test," e.g. where you're given a large envelope with some loose documents in it, and instructed to prepare a complaint in 3 hours. In short order, keeping track of paper became the bane of my existence. As did keeping timesheets! In fact, I once sought out the services of a psychologist to help me with organizational issues, only to be referred to a psychoanalyst who spent close to three years constructing a theory that I avoided timesheets as a way of avoiding the issue of time, in my search to return to the eternal state of the womb. (Not a word is made up, I swear.) It was only a couple of years later, after the analyst and I had parted ways over the burden his fees were imposing on my (very young) family budget, did someone else suggest the possibility of ADHD-I (inattentive). I got tested and was off the charts.

So in an instant much of my life was explained. Only problem was, I couldn't tolerate the meds. Ritalin sent me to the hospital with tachycardia, while other things triggered anxiety attacks of unbelievable proportion. (Oh note to Pete - a true panic attack, in the psychoanalytic sense, is something else, which I've also had: you're feeling so relaxed and wonderful that "monsters" are able to free themselves from your subconscious, only they aren't perceived as such, instead they classically feel like a heart attack, except that you're fine. Very similar to classical descriptions of the Buddha being set upon by the "Armies of Mara" during an all night sit on the eve of his enlightenment.)

But I digress, it remained the organizational demons that threatened to bring me down, try creating a "privilege log" setting forth the different reasons why each of over 600 emails should be exempt from turnover in discovery, that, in desperation I joined a gym, waiver and release and all, and engaged the services of a personal trainer so no to aggravate a couple of cervical disks. No problem, he just put me on a seated calf extension, which I later found out that no one with flat feet should ever use, and over a month or six weeks, I badly shredded the peroneus brevis tendons in both feet, which were ultimately cast, whereupon unusual pain set in . . . .

And here I am.

Mike

I almost like paperwork. But then I've always believed that one of my missions in life is to do away with it entirely. I used to be able to just drop filling out portions of forms until someone complained but by that time a better way to get that person the information he actually needed had become apparent. Then I could use my free time to invent simpler paperwork just for my own use. One job I got the paperwork component down from about 5 hours to about one hour. There isn't really any work for bosses so most of them spend their time inventing new paperwork so they can all look busy.

My memesis is phone calls. I have to pshche myself up for days to make them then I'll still be able to make only a few in one day. I didn't like phones even before the invention of phone trees so you can imagine how much I hate them now. Phone trees were invented to keep customers and interested parties from calling.