Marilyn Wells is one organized person. Want to borrow one of her 5,000 books? Within seconds she can tell you on which shelf it's kept in which room, how far it is from the right or left of the shelf and the color of the cover. You want to know the copyright date on it? No problem. She can tell you without touching the book itself.
Want to hear Mozart's "Requiem" on CD performed on period instruments? Want to compare it with the LP-recorded version ++ played at John F. Kennedy's funeral? In a flash, she can pull each from among the hundreds of LPs, CDs and cassette tapes in her collection.
No, Ms. Wells is not an organizational savant, the "Rainwoman" of Chevy Chase. She's just an everyday kind of busy woman. Well, she does have a doctorate in engineering management, and she teaches computer system design at George Washington University and other engineering classes at the University of Maryland. She also heads the Wells-Johnson Foundation, an organization that encourages and disseminates research in the relationships among technology, human systems and human structure.
"But please don't make me sound like a computer nerd," she says. "I look like an earth mother."
While she may not be a computer nerd, she certainly is a dedicated technophile, who capitalizes on the potential of home computers to keep the details of her busy life in order.
Her books, music, Christmas cards, even her clothes are all noted on spreadsheets on her hard drive. "I just keep the computer on all the time and note things as they come up," she says.
This saves her much time trying to locate the myriad items that comprise life in the material world. The LPs, for example, are stored in racks, each containing numbered slots. Each rack is lettered -- A, B, C, D, etc. Before a record goes in a slot, its pertinent information is noted on a spreadsheet, along with its letter and numerical locater. All it takes to find a specific tune or artist's version of it is punching a "find" key after typing in the name of the tune or some other bit of information.
It's the same with books and clothes. She says she usually enters what's necessary from the daily mail and makes other updates while watching the evening news. She says it takes her no longer than five minutes each day to keep everything up to date.
IN TIME
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