Back to the Franklin Habit

(with apologies to Franklin Habit...)



So I gave in.

I posted a little while ago about how calendars were calling to me with the beginning of the new year. Well, as I thought about it more, I decided that my current electronic-only planning and organizational system wasn't doing all that a planning and organizational system should do, and I bought a complete 2008 refill for my trusty old Franklin Planner. I've been using it for almost 3 weeks now, and I'm already feeling more like myself than I have since well before Conner was born.

In addition to becoming a first-time mom last June, I recently finished two other major projects in my life that have been going for multiple years -- moving into our dream log home and finishing development on the most ambitious product of my career to date -- and I could see myself soon falling into complacency and maintenance rather than pushing forward with new goals and ambitions. Conner, the house, and the new product at work all kept going because momentum had been established; I didn't really need to do much planning just to keep them on track and moving along.

But now they're finished (ok, well, Conner will be an "ongoing project" for the next 18 years, but the others are finished) and no new projects were already spinning under their own momentum. It takes determination to keep new projects spinning along, and I just wasn't getting that determination from my Treo. In the early stages of a project, I need to be able to keep the mile-high view in front of me in order to find the motivation to slog through the daily tasks. That's not easy to do electronically.

So I'm back to my trusty Franklin planner and training. I have my values, goals, and intermediate goals laid out, some daily tasks accomplished, and I'm starting to roll again. I think I'll stick with the Franklin planner for some time now, but we'll see about that as we go forward. I still keep contacts and reference memos on my Treo, but otherwise it's been relegated to phone, text messaging, sudoku, and ebook duty, and that's ok with me for now.

New Year = New Calendar Lust

What is it about a new year that makes me lust after paper-based calendars, planners, and notebooks? I've long-since established that my Treo and electronic planning works best for me, but that doesn't keep all those shiny, bright white calendars from belting out their siren songs.

My old Franklin planner training cries out "Keep only one calendar!" and "Have your calendar always with you." Well, the only one that's always with me is my Treo. And it is nice to be able to enter something once and see it in day, week, or monthly views all at the tap of a stylus. And to-dos? Well, they rarely get done on the day that I hope that they'll get done, especially since the baby came to be, so two-tap or drag-and-drop task forwarding keeps the productivity guilt at bay. You can't do any of that with a paper planner.

Still, at this time of year I start cruising the calendar clearance sales. This one will look good on my cubicle wall at work. That one will help the whole family keep track of each other, especially if it's on the fridge. And, gee, wouldn't it be nice to have a fresh sudoku puzzle and/or knitting pattern each and every day? (As if I had the time!)

Maybe it's part of the whole New Year's resolutions craze. Sometimes it's nice to erase all the old undone stuff and start fresh. I find it very liberating sometimes to look at something that's been on my list for eons, and to say "I'm not going to do that." But it's also really hard to do -- to actively delete something. It's much easier to start with a fresh book and just neglect to transfer a task, project, or goal. You can't do that with a planner that operates on electrons. You actually have to take action and delete it.

Over the years I've bought plenty of calendars and planners that did nothing for me but go quickly out of date. I always gravitate back toward electronic planning. Especially now that it's meshed with my cell phone, my PDA is always with me, and a paper planner just adds bulk to an already stuffed purse (which, these days, is more like a backpack!).

I still don't know what I'm going to do this year, but I do know that there's a sale running over at Caledars.com...

It's School Supply Season!

I love this time of year. Everywhere I go, colorful school supplies crowd store entrances and the "seasonal products" aisles. Notebooks, pens, binders, backpacks ... they all make me nostalgic, and I always end up caving in and buying at least a few things.

It's not that I loved school when I was a kid. The social game could be brutal, and while I was a decent student, I cherry-picked which subjects I'd pay attention to and ignored the rest as much as possible. But every fall held the promise of a do-over:

This year I'll be popular and have a boyfriend.
This year I'll get straight A's.
This year I'll write the great American novel, and be the next S. E. Hinton.

These never happened, of course, but I made the promises to myself anyway, like some people make New Year's resolutions. I'm still tempted to buy a brand-new notebook or binder every time I start a new project, because new supplies tend to put me in the right psychological place to believe that I might actually accomplish my goals.

The problem is that I really like the whimsically-designed school supplies that only crop up a few months of the year; the rest of the time I'm stuck with the bland offerings of the office supply stores. So every year I buy a few things, intending to hold them in reserve for the rest of the year when such imaginative designs are harder to come by. But they never last. New notebooks burn holes in my pockets just like money does for other people. I just can't resist virgin paper.

I don't think there's a cure for this particular obsession of mine, so I'll just muddle on as usual, buying a binder here and a pen there until the stores start running out of their supply in late September. See you in the "seasonal" aisle!

Me and My Treo

I admit it -- I've always loved Star Trek. It began with Captain Kirk and continued to all the different series through the years. I'm probably a borderline fanatic. I'm not as crazy as the fans who follow the conventions around the country and attend in full Federation uniform, but I have attended a convention, I own a bootlegged script of Generations, and a Bajoran earpiece resurfaces every once-in-a-while in my jewelry box.

I was always fascinated by the tablets that the characters worked on, especially the one Jake Sisko used to write his stories. They were highly portable, used a stylus, and seemed to be tapped in to the local computer system. How cool was that? Word processing at your fingertips, plus complete database access, all while loitering on the Promenade.

So when the first round of Palm Pilots came out, I had to have one. Not only could I see myself shedding my big Franklin Planner, I could also see myself doing quite a bit of writing on the run -- all in one small package. I'd finally have my Star Trek tablet.

I got one for Christmas, and was very excited. I started transferring my planner data right away, and found some word processing software to load on it. I learned Graffiti and discovered eBooks. But making the transition was difficult. I had to think differently when planning on the Palm than with paper, and I still hadn't really started writing on it. I fell back to paper planning several times, but eventually the Palm started winning out. Until, one day, I dropped the Palm while pulling it out to reference a shopping list. It never worked again.

I returned to paper, but discovered that I missed some of the features of the Palm -- nearly unlimited future calendars, alarms for my appointments, and a small package. At the same time, I started to find that I couldn't do much productive writing on paper. My writing habits had become too accustomed to word processors, but I didn't have access to a laptop at the time. A little while later they came out with the sleek new Palm m500. I hinted pretty hard, and received one for my birthday, along with a portable keyboard.

Since then, I've been hooked. I stuck with the m500 until work gave me a Tungsten 2 to use. Then we bought ourselves Treo 650s for Christmas shortly after they came out.

I've had short affairs with paper planning, but I've always come back to whatever Palm I had access to at the time. I rely on the alarms to keep me on track during the day. I have a single address book that ties to my cell phone and caller ID, synchs to my home computer, and sits in a periodically updated hard copy next to the kitchen phone. I can plan projects in ShadowPlan on my Treo or on my home computer, and then port the plan to my task list and calendar (try doing that with MS Project!). I have constant access to a thesaurus and dictionary, plus countless other fiction and nonfiction books. My entire recipe book is in Treo memos, accessible when I'm in the grocery store and discover a fabulous sale on some usually expensive key ingredient. The list goes on and on.

But taking notes or doing any kind of extended writing is still a problem. I'm just not quite there yet with the Jake Sisko tablet writing system. And that makes me sad.

I'd gotten pretty fast with Graffiti, but it was still error-prone and the Treo doesn't use it anyway. Then I found a virtual keyboard replacement called MessageEase, and got pretty fast with it on my T2, but it keeps crashing my Treo and takes up valuable screen space. Fold-out keyboards require a table and plenty of fussing before you can be off and running, and the one I have isn't terribly accurate. I'm all thumbs on the thumboard, which is a painful experience for a 100+ wpm touch typist. And the screen is too small to review what I've written before going on to the next paragraph -- a key element in my writing process.

So I still use paper for note-taking, and I try to save up the productive writing for when I have access to a full keyboard and computer. I can make do with the Treo in a pinch, but the technology keeps getting in my way, and doesn't allow me to become absorbed into the writing process like I can on a full-sized keyboard and monitor. And I feel that my writing suffers because of it.

In a way, I think still having a link to paper has been good for me, but that's a whole different post. In the meantime, I'm still trying to find the perfect Star Trek tablet. My dream? A pint-sized tablet Mac. Barring that, I'll take a Palm LifeDrive with a built-in cell phone.

Apple? Palm? Are you listening?

Keep Only One Calendar

I first got into the habit of using a calendar when I was in high school. I was editor of the school newspaper and I needed something to help me keep track of my interview appointments. So I went out and bought an undated weekly calendar from the local drug store. I quickly started filling it with all sorts of things of interest to a teenager, and I enjoyed looking over the pages at the end of each week to see how much I had accomplished.

That habit carried over into college, where I used the calendars they sold in the school bookstore that had the university crest on the cover. I could look over a week at a time, and instantly know what I needed to do from day to day. I thought I was pretty organized. Not only did I usually show up to classes and events on time (my 7:25 am Brit Lit 1 course not withstanding), but I normally showed up relatively prepared, too. Sure, I pulled the occasional all-nighter as all college students do, but on the whole things seemed under control.

Then I hit the professional world and I stumbled across Franklin Planners. Something prodded me to buy a taped FranklinQuest time management seminar. I listened to those tapes many times over the years, until I had whole sections of the course memorized. Finally, I had discovered that I was not alone in my obsession with calendars! The planner that sat before me was the mother of all calendars. I took it everywhere. I was hooked.

On those tapes, Hyrum Smith, the founder of the Franklin Quest company himself, exhorted me to "keep only one calendar", and I thought but of course. If you keep more than one calendar, you risk double-booking, or missing appointments. I'd never had a problem with this -- I only ever had access to one calendar at a time.

But today it's not so easy. I traded in my bulky planner for a series of Palms (I could wax poetic on my Treo, but I'll save that for a later post). Then my PowerBook came with Calendar and Address Book. Then my office started requiring us all to use the calendaring portion of Lotus Notes. My free email addresses from Yahoo and Google? They came with calendars, too. And now that I'm married, there's my husband's calendar to synchronize with. Things were never this complicated in college.

The only problem I've managed to solve, more or less, is the Lotus Notes problem. I know that from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, I'm generally at work. So I sign out those hours from my Treo and schedule future office meetings with Lotus Notes. Then each morning I put that day's appointments into my Treo and let the Treo's alarms keep me on schedule throughout the day. The system works pretty well. I only have to worry about the occasional day when I'm not in the office, and those dates are relatively easy to keep synchronized.

I'm still fascinated by other calendars, electronic and paper alike, and I continue to play with them whenever I get the chance. Each one has its own personality, its own feature set. But when I'm playing with those other calendars, life is difficult. I never know where a piece of information is stored, I miss appointments, or I double-book, just as Hyrum warned me. So I keep coming back to my Treo. It's what I'm used to, and it works.

The biggest thing I haven't resolved yet is the problem of keeping my calendar synchronized with my husband's. When things get crazy I try to sit down with him and make sure we're on the same page, but we still end up booking each other for mystery events every once-in-a-while. We've played with several systems that should let us see each others' schedules, but none have met all our requirements yet.

My calendar system is still a work in progress, and probably always will be. It's not perfect; I'm still struggling with learning to say "no" when my plate is full, but aren't we all?