Planning to be thoughtful Part I

Young women, in general, have to struggle with paranoia: being too thoughtful, too self-conscious, too worried.

Young men, in general, have to struggle more with the opposite: thoughtlessness.

How often, young men, have you been confronted with someone in deep distress and been rebuked for having been thoughtless about their predicament? Perhaps they have told you a little bit about what they have been going through, and you honestly did listen - or thought you did - but you kinda figured that if you needed to do anything more about it, someone would've told you what to do. Later on, you are told that you were thoughtless for not having realised how bad it was that you didn't do anything about the information you had.

Here, then are a few proverbs to help guard against thoughtlessness:

1.  A lot of thoughtfulness is achieved through simple organisation - so get organised. Guys need this, because we can't hold all this stuff in their head. It is sometimes said that guys can't multi-task like girls can. That's a lie. What we can't do is multi-think. Cows have four stomachs and girls have four brains. They can think about making turkish delight and what their mum said to them last night and whether it's Saskia's birthday this week or next.

So if you are going to give yourself the best chance in the world of being thoughtful, you need to write important bits of information down.