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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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 I think this is one...Submitted by Brerlapn on March 24, 2006 - 7:44am.
GOD wrote:
I think this is one of the most important things I learned from GTD and something I try to impress upon everyone I talk to about being productive -- always have a quick and painless capture device. Just this little lifehack is so incredibly and unbelievably powerful. Right, but the reason to keep the Treo in the loop, at least for me, is that it does me no good to write down appointments (especially more than a week into the future) if there's not something to remind me when they're about to happen. Even writing down a time/date specific item doesn't help clear it from my head because I still have the lingering worry that I will forget about it until after it has happened. Paper works great for floating to-do items and random ideas, though, because if I don't look at my list for a week I haven't really missed anything. » POSTED IN:
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