Fish Your PDA Out of the Trash
About a month ago, I posted a link to PocketMod, a web site that helps you create "disposable personal organizers." I cleverly titled the post "Throw Away Your PDA," and promised to post about how my PocketMod experiment went.
To keep a short story short, the experiment lasted about two days, and I didn't write a single word on the thing. Not that I've carried my Palm around with me in about a year. It rests, as ever, in its dusty cradle back behind the subwoofer for my Creature speakers.
Here's my theory: I've been putting off a complete re-organization of my personal data for so long, and it's become so disorganized, that I am basically incapable of employing any portable organizational assistance without first implementing some life-wide solution to the problem of contact info, schedule, and to do lists.
But in the meantime, what the PocketMod site is really good for is showing you how to fold an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper into a little booklet that isn't interrupted by folds in the wrong places. If you were clever, you could put a whole day's shooting script on one of those.
Comments
I used the PocketMod on a recent trip to Europe, and it worked great. I busted my PDA several months back and decided to live without it since I rarely used it anyhow. I usually just use my laptop instead. When I'm traveling and need something easy and portable—and with a small but essential subset of my total data—the PocketMod fits the bill.
If you're looking for an organizing principle, I can suggest the FranklinCovey approach. It's comprehensive and well-explained; worth a look.
I got Stephen going on PocketMod because he was searching for a way to allow him to be in 5 places at once. He used it for about a week and went back to blindly rushing from one group project meeting to the next. I think he decided that writing in a planner was killing his "productivity."
I spent so much time trying to decide if using PocketMod was environmentally uncouth that the week had already gone by and there was nothing left to write down.