The busy week is drawing to a close, and that means it is time to share the happenings at Mobile Tech Manor with you. It was a week of software changes that have brought a major revision of my work methods in the Manor. It was a time of reflection on the way I work, and a shift back to the days of the paper organizer. A utility I have used for a long time was relegated to the out file, and a new one rushed in to take its place.
I recently switched web browsers (again), and this week I was still using Google Chrome. Chrome is so darn fast and has evolved to the point it is very stable doing my work. I am in the web browser all day, every day — sometimes on more than one computer at a time — and Chrome worked nearly flawlessly. I only saw the dreaded “Aw snap” screen a few times. That’s the screen you get when Chrome can’t load a web page for some reason. I found it humorous that it was always the same web page that caused the errors — Google Reader. I hit refresh each time and the page loaded no problems, it’s just ironic that Google’s own web page was failing. I am otherwise impressed with Chrome and will continue using it on both Windows and OS X.
The paper organizer
Remember the paper organizer that was so popular years ago? Those Franklin day planners that were everywhere in the corporate environment? You’d walk into a conference room for a meeting and find the table covered with those organizers, as almost everyone had them in front of them.
I used one of those many years ago and I must admit my work day was better organized for it. Once my work methodology embraced the organizer, it became second nature to use it best to fit my work. I developed a way to capture important information on the fly, and just as importantly I learned to refer to it regularly so nothing fell through the cracks. It was a pain to carry the organizer with me everywhere, but it did the job well.
I’m not a paper kind of guy though, and I made a big effort back then to offload the organizer’s functions onto a digital platform. I found the PDA of yore to be the perfect vehicle for this function, and was able to tailor a system that worked well for me. The key was the PDA was always at hand, and it became a key tool in organizing my day. The paper organizer became a thing of the past as its digital counterpart took over.
When I shuttered my consultancy a few years back, the daily organizer routine fell by the wayside. It wasn’t a conscious decision on my part that led to this, it simply evolved through the different nature of my work. I wasn’t juggling as many different projects, and I was not working with so many different companies and colleagues. I guess making an effort to keep every aspect of the work day organized didn’t feel critical, and it’s surprising how easy it was to fall out of the good habits developed over years. The daily organizer, paper and digital, fell by the side of the road and was history.
A new system for handling the errata of the work day evolved, and I thought it was serving me pretty well. I migrated a lot of the organizational tools to the cloud and cobbled a system together using computers and smartphones to handle it. While this method has worked, it has never become second nature to me like my earlier methods. I was occasionally missing something I shouldn’t have missed, simply because having the information available and actually checking it were two different things.
My email and calendar system are in Google Apps, due to the setup at GigaOM. This works well, as I can access the information easily from smartphones and computers with ease. I spend most of the day in the web browser when sitting in front of a computer, and this cloud-based system works well for that.
Task management is another matter, unfortunately. I have experimented with different tools and methods to handle tasks, many of them chronicled in this column over the past two years. I eventually settled on Remember the Milk, a cloud service that has worked OK. I was able to integrate it into my Gmail setup in the browser, and use standalone apps on different smartphones to work with my task list each day. I thought it was working well, but still found that occasionally something fell through the cracks as I would forget to update RTM, or miss checking it regularly. This has been bothering me for a while, and this past week I did something about it.
I gave a lot of thought comparing my past organizer methods with my current work flow. It struck me that the primary difference in these two systems was how the organizer, paper or digital, was always with me and thus easy to develop the habit to regularly refer to it. Building a good system to keep track of my life was one thing, but habitually referring to it so nothing got missed quite another.
I realized that my problem was related to the tools I was using. I had my organizational utilities scattered over multiple devices, and that impeded with developing proper habits to oversee my information. I was keeping track of things fine while sitting in front of my computer, as I had all the tools integrated into my workflow in the browser. Where it was falling down was when I stepped away from the computer. I wasn’t regularly checking on things using the smartphone (or other mobile device). I was falling victim to the fact that my different tools were scattered around different devices, and that led to the “out of sight, out of mind” problem.
Thinking on this situation, it hit me why the paper organizer of old was such a good tool for many. Everything was in that one tool, so developing proper habits to interact with the information was easy to do. Now I left the paper world a long time ago, and had no desire to enter it again. What to do?
Paying attention to the way I work, I realized an important fact. Since getting the iPad, it is almost always within reach everywhere I might be in the house. Plus it is easy to carry around given its form, and I often bring it with me when I head out for short outings. In that regard it is much like that organizer of old in that it is always at hand. I thought about that for a while, and worked on a system using the iPad that can handle my work day in a manner that fits my current work methods.
I started using the calendar app on the iPad in earnest, and found it does a good job when actually used regularly. The ability to “zoom out” of my schedule and see what’s looming in the future makes it a good tool for the way I work. I sync the calendar to multiple Google calendars, and once I made an effort to use the tool regularly as I should I found things dropping into place.
The Remember the Milk task management was falling short on the iPad, as there is no native app for it yet. I was using the iPhone app on the iPad, and while it worked it wasn’t taking advantage of the larger screen of the slate. I looked around and got a free Toodledo account, which is similar in function to RTM but with one important difference — there’s an iPad app for that. Once I had the Toodledo system working as I preferred, I started looking around for a task management app on the iPad that let me interact with my task list as I needed. The Toodledo app is good, but it’s limited in how I can display the task list to focus on the stuff I need to concentrate on at any given time.
I found ToDo for the iPad, and the clincher was it syncs with Toodledo. I didn’t have to build yet another task management system, I just input my Toodledo account information and in seconds ToDo had all of my tasks properly incorporated. The graphical presentation of ToDo is strangely comforting given my objective of getting back to my organizer roots, as it presents the task list in a pseudo binder. The program gives me complete control over my task list and how it is displayed, and it has made a positive impact in my daily routine.
My new system is working well because I have all of the tools and information in one place, the iPad. This made it easy to develop the proper habits to get on top of my work day. The iPad is not the only solution to do this by any means, but it’s always at hand and presents a lot of information at once to provide a decent picture into my day. It has become a digital organizer like that old paper variety, and it’s working well for me.
I reviewed iThoughts HD this week, and since then it has become an integral part of this new system. I have used mind mapping for years, mostly as a graphical outliner for complex writing projects but also a a project management system. I prefer graphical maps for such uses, and iThoughts has allowed me to pick up where I left off years ago. This is working because I have developed the habit of using the iPad as the organizer of my important information. Since it’s always at hand, I find it natural to make a mind map when a new project is just a glimmer of thought. With this simple tool that idea becomes a real project in just a few minutes.
On the web
You have probably seen the video of the 13 year-old Greyson Chance performing a Lady Gaga song at a festival. When I first ran across the video early in the week, his performance hadn’t been picked up yet and I knew it was going to be big. Real talent is hard to hide, and this kid has it already. Notice how the crowd of kids is silent during his performance, the sure sign of shock at how good this kid is.
e-Book of the week
This week I read a collection of short stories by Stacey Cochran, The Kiribati Test. The stories were entertaining, and while not the best I’ve read worth the penny Amazon charged me for the Kindle version. Yes, Amazon was selling this book for a penny, and I found it on the best sellers list. It’s not there now, so I recommend you check that list frequently. I’ve picked up lots of free and cheap books this way.
Wrap up
That’s my week, I hope you get something useful in sharing it. I’ll be back with the next installment next week. Take care.
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