Timekeeping - Analog to digital and back

About a year ago I bought my all in one mobile device, gift wrapped as a brilliant catch on ebay, I used it extensively for the duration of the year (no, it wasn’t a Steve Pavlina experiment, but maybe I should take up his method, though).

I had a fully analog way of time keeping that during that time, was focusing heavily on David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner. Getting the PDA made me go 100% digital because…well…all the perks of digital were there: at hand, everywhere I was and since I’ve alway been liberal with GRPS traffic always “update-able”, having the PDA also made up for my utter lack of memory for certain items (birthdays, addresses, locations, name of someone’s wife, etc) it was right there all accessible and at that it never failed me.

First headache was really all the syncing going on…I have two exchange accounts (one for Safira and one for Sonaecom) and since I feel strange committing my personal life to any of those calendars, I also had a google calendar. Activesync is as hopeless as it’s always been and bluetooth connection with activesync just makes it even more unbearable.

So I was juggling calendars, fighting activesync on daily basis and doing reboots so that bluetooth would work with it this time around… In all honesty it’s just so broken with annoyances that I find it hard to understand why anyone would subject him or herself to that sort of aggravation. (maybe other people just “sync”, maybe the cradle is a safer bet then bluetooth (it really is!) maybe they just don’t care that much about the “unresolved sync issues” and that there’s no clear way of fixing them. But me? I’m too anal to have unresolved sync issues).

As of late I found myself missing two meetings, not being informed about stuff happening in my own life…and the last time that sort of stuff happened was…well…never! checking calendars the events were there, they were just not on the pda…AGAIN! so I decided to take it like a shot of lousy scotch…”I’ll lose a day working on this, but I’ll fix it…” so I decided to use two pieces of software: One for syncing both my outlook accounts with google calendar and then google calendar with the PDA, leaving activesych with the heafty (!) task of syncing just the address book and whichever emails are in the mailbox in that point in time (I admit, in the past year I only checked for a work related email on the PDA once, so…not that important).

Oggsync will sync the outlook calendars with google calendar. The free version will sync only the 3 days around the current day (which didn’t bother me for testing purposes), they ask for 30 bucks a year in exchange for the pro version that syncs more days and can flag events as private among other niceties… 30 bucks a year is a sheer rip off, but hey…

Gmobilesync will sync my wm5 device with google calendar (which thanks to oggsync now has two extra calendars with both outlook accounts).

it’s all good. My pda has all the events, everything is fine.

And today this happened:

I downloaded the latest version of David’s ETP and started adding stuff. And finally, again, I feel I have control over my schedule. It’s a strange feeling, that me of all people (the early adopter, the guy who fearlessly tries out stuff and sticks to digital every time the chance arises) felt much more in control with some printed out PDF’s and my dreadful handwriting then with it’s digital counterpart.

Going back to paper has at least one advantage: I’m not blindly trusting that stuff is synced…actually, there’s no syncing at all, just a few sheets of paper that keep track of my day.

Google calendar is still a big repository of stuff…but there’s really just this big block identifying “working hours”, the ETP is really where I go down to the little parts that encompass that big block. So Google Calendar gives me a macro vision of my day, ETP gives me some more verbosity, that I can scratch, draw, jot down and mess as much as I see fit.

ETP feels like home, I like home…it’s safe there.