Too many organizers…too little time…and it’s time to simplify
Today I missed meeting a friend for lunch and feel like a complete butthead. I’ve got plenty of excuses (our house is being remodeled for one) but the real reasons is this: I have too many organizers and too many places to keep updated — and I had the appointment on my personal Blackberry but it was turned off while I’m at work since I don’t want to carry around two Blackberries.
All these PDA’s and Blackberries were supposed to make sure that we had our life, our to-do’s and our communications at our fingertips. It’s supposed to be easy, but I find “feeding the beast of data and keeping all the beasts in line” is a never-ending saga.
- I have a Blackberry 7230 for work that sync’s with my work calendar in Lotus Notes. I refrain from keeping my personal stuff on my work laptop which includes my calendar and email.
- I have a personal Blackberry 7100 that sync’s with my home Powermac. The kicker? During the house remodel I’ve been relying on my Powerbook as my main machine and iCal (Apple’s calendar program which I use for personal appointments and tasks) is up-to-date on my home machine as is my main address book.
I know that I can sync across devices, operating systems and programs or pay a monthly fee for Apple’s .Mac program to sync my Mac boxes up with each other. But all I want to do is to have this be SEAMLESS and EASY. Though I wrestled with using Gmail for my main email program — since Google can target ads that wrap around each email — the benefit of having my email in ONE PLACE accessible from ANY MACHINE makes it worth it (I used to get email on my Powerbook in Apple’s Mail program and then go to my Powermac or the HP laptop I have and NOT have it available to me…what a crazymaker).
If Google adds a calendar to Gmail…that will be my main one and, hopefully, they’ll have figured out how to sync PDA’s, phones and Blackberries to their server-side offerings.
By the way, I have four email addresses that all forward to my Gmail account but 3 of the 4 require me to maintain them. Once a month or so I have to login to the webmail client of each and delete emails en masse. Time to simplify…
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About Steve Borsch
Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.
Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.
Your sentiments regarding Gmail echo mine . . . I use it as a central, web-based portal to which all my email is forwarded (and I use labels to identify the source). But it really needs a calendar and sync ability to be truly ready for prime time.
Get a Treo !
I’ve found that having your own domain, along with a solid hosting provider, is invaluable. Since you’ve already got the website thing taken care of, you -probably- wouldn’t need a high-traffic account if it’s just email. You can usually get pretty affordable hosting for a few bucks a month, and most of them are IMAP these days. My own provider uses squirrelmail to provide webmail access. Granted, it’s not as slick as Gmail, but most of the time I have my PowerBook with me if I’m away from my PowerMac at home.