Scattered data

One of the main reasons why I bought my first Palm PDA was because it offered a high level of organization on the go. No more fussing around with diaries, notepads and scraps of papers which I didn’t bring with me all the time. Not to forget the fact that I could edit existing data without messing up everything, plus the benefit of not having to read my own, horrible handwriting! As nice as this all sounds, it never solved my organization problems completely. None of my devices has solved those problems.

Why? Because my data has always been scattered across the various built-in PIM applications. Appointments, to-do’s, notes and even documents. Carrying arround a large amount of data requires different places to store it, based on the type of data. Otherwise, the whole thing would be cluttered with of course. But way too often I forget something, simply because I haven’t looked it up. I can even forget it when I set a reminder for it. It’s just so frustrating having to look at multiple applications for my daily dose of information.

Do you want an example? Sure thing. I’m still in school, so I have to deal with a number of things like appointments, deadlines, homework tasks and notes. If I put my homework in tasks, I won’t see the deadlines for it in my calendar. If I would put all my homework in my calendar, I wouldn’t be able to check if it was completed, plus the fact that I would clutter op my appointments. The notes thing looks easy, since you can add notes to appointments, tasks and even contacts. However, Windows Mobile doesn’t show at first glance whether you made a note within a certain object (Palm OS does). This means that if I don’t click on the object, I will risk missing crucial data that was captured in the note.

To prevent headaches, I tried a lot of manners like putting everything in a note like a big plan. But that didn’t work (neither did it prevent organization headaches). It’s nice to have Calendar, Tasks, Notes, OneNote Mobile, Word Mobile and Excel Mobile on my device, in the sense that it gives me the option to store my information within these applications. But it’s truly awful to get the stuff that you want at the moment that you need it, let alone remembering where you stored your information in the first place. So the search of better organization continues…