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Using Paper + Pda?
4ster | Mar 22 2006
Hi everyone. First the backstory: I got out of grad school in 1997 and started working and trying to use a DayTimer. It did not work because it was huge and ugly and I hated carrying it around. In February 1998, I bought a Palm III, which worked well for me. It was fun to use, and always with me. I have used PDAs ever since. The things that made the PDA work for me were that it was always with me and that it forced structure on me. I could not cram paper into it or write in the margins. I had to do it right. However, this created a messed-up thought process in me: it made me think everything has to be all digital or all analog. There can be no intermingling of the two. I have no idea where this came from, but it became my predeominant way of thinking. It was like I was afraid of betraying the PDA cause, having too much to carry, or something else crazy. Fast-forward to today: I have a Treo so I don't have to carry planner and (e)books and phone and to-do list and notepad and address book, etc. However, now I have read GTD and now cannot live without the GTD Outlook Plug-in. Yet there is something unexplainably intriguing about the Hipster PDA and the Moleskine. I cannot give up a digital planner (my addresses just HAVE to be perfectly alphabetized). Even though I am, after eight years of PDA use, pretty darn fast at input, I have found I am less likely to write down everything in the Treo as I am in my (just made today) hPDA. I also spend WAY TOO MUCH time looking at Treo-related junk online when I should be actually living life. The Hipskine (desktop + moleskine) is an idea I never thought about. It seems redundant, but GTD is not about the fastest way. It is about the best way, right? If anyone is using some combination of PDA/Smartphone and paper, I would love to hear how you make it work. I just wish I had thougt of this before I bought the damn Treo. 5 Comments
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 There are some things I...Submitted by GOD on March 22, 2006 - 11:22pm.
There are some things I like to do digitally and others I like to do analog. My GTD world exists between my PDA and my small Mead Marble Memo Book. I don't sync my PDA up to anything -- that's been quite freeing for me actually. But the little notebook is what makes the biggest difference. I keep it in my pocket at all times and write things there when it is quicker than pulling out my PDA. I put short-term support information at the back and anything that needs to be processed at the front. I also keep a few post-its in there on the inside of the back cover. The main thing to ask yourself is, what do you want to write down? One of the main reasons I don't like the Moleskine for GTD is that you can't rip the pages out. Once I've used a page as much as I can then it gets thrown away and I have a fresh page at the top. I always only have to turn to the first page to see what tasks are waiting for me. However, when there is reference information that I'd like to write by hand (usually random lectures where I don't want to type on my PDA) then I'll write them in my Moleskine. Finally, a little redundancy is ok, but I find it's best to have one system. If you spread it out then you run the risk of not trusting your system because they are not synced up. » POSTED IN:
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