Years ago, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks did spontaneous comic interviews at parties that became so popular they recorded some of them. In one, Reiner interviewed Brooks, who was supposed to be an astronaut. After a string of still-funny responses, Reiner finally told Brooks that he didn’t think he was equipped to be an astronaut. “What do you mean?” Brooks replied, “I’ve got boots and gloves and everything. I’ve got a heavy fur hat . . .”
We’ve been looking at a range of devices and applications designed to help us plan and organize our daily work. The main way these programs really do this, though, isn’t just in ordering important information and making it accessible and subject to easy manipulation. That’s pretty good, but it’s not enough. You want to not only be able to organize your time, but to use it with focus and clarity when you turn to each new task. . .
So, in the course of the past week or so, we’ve geeked up pretty thoroughly – lots of gadgets and applications and each with its intricately rationalized time and place. And now it’s only fair to ask, where has it gotten us? What’s the point? What does all of this do for us that we [...]
In our current discussion of portable time-management gadgets, we began by focusing on paper-based daily planners/organizers. We then moved on to a progression of computerized versions of these. Finally, we gave a round-up of the capabilities of my current device, a Nokia E71 business-oriented smart phone, which extend well beyond the initial requirements we had for such instruments. These new functions seem almost indispensable, now. But let’s take the discussion back to the core problem . . .
As we’ve talked about gadgets over the past week, we’ve seen the daily organizers and planners that I have found myself using decrease in size and number while simultaneously increasing in capability, flexibility, and usability. At this point, aside from office-based equipment, we are down to a slim yet rugged and extraordinarily powerful Nokia E71. . .
The first cell phone I used was about the size of a shoe box and weighed several pounds – basically a battery with a phone strapped on top. And, if you can imagine this, all it did was make phone calls. Things have come a ways since then, haven’t they?
We’ve been talking about the evolution of modern daily planners/organizers from paper-based, to computer-based, and then to synchronizable computer/hand-held pairs. This began as a fairly simple process, but as the reach of technology grew, greater ambitions in these hand-held devices became realizable. Before long, I had moved from my original Palm Pilot to a Dell Axim, and then, for the past few years, an HP iPAQ. . .
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