Managing the Beforehand - Breathing Space Blog

During the closing days of my senior year of high school, I rounded up some of the items on the bulletin board that I thought would make great mementos. I had a roster of all the letter winners who were invited to the awards dinner last week. I also had the daily absentee list of the senior class, several of the school's monthly newsletters, and various other announcements and memos.

Over the years, moving from Connecticut to Washington, DC to North Carolina, these items remained in a slim folder of other school items such as report cards, progress reports, and college acceptance letters.

For many reasons, my high school class did not have a five or ten of fifteen year reunion. They had one eighteen year reunion which I heard about afterwards and then another at thirty which, thankfully, I did learn about in time to attend. In preparation for attending the thirtieth reunion, I carefully copied all my artifacts from my high school days, left the copies at home, and brought the originals with me.

When I dispensed them to the class secretary and other officers, it blew them away. They made announcements during the evening of the artifacts I had so carefully preserved over the last thirty years.

One of my friends, Greg, thought I was nuts. Actually, what I had been doing was practicing the art of managing the beforehand, long before I even had defined it. It just occurred to me that someday what represented every day kinds of documents in way back when would be highly noteworthy 30 years later.