Practical Life Hacking: Technology and Pitfalls

Life hacking seems to be the new buzz term for the principle of organization and time management. In the new web 2.0 world, the focus has gone from all those cute little daily planners to laptops and calendar software suites. As a time management perfectionist I have spent a lot of time, energy and unfortunately money in search for the cure all for keeping track of my busy schedule. Here I will present to you some of my results in my quest for the holy grail. We will cover the use of software, hardware and methods for keeping track of your time and resources as well as some pitfalls to avoid.

Software

Let's start by bringing up the term PIM. PIM stands for Personal Information Manager. While a notebook with dividers can be considered a PIM, the term is usually reserved for software. PIM software can come in almost any configuration, from a single application to an entire suite of tools that work together. For our purpose we will look at our options in the measure of financial cost, functionality, and ease of use. The most useful PIM tools are usually going to fall along following lines:

- Calendar with appointments and notifications
- Contact and contact group information
- Email
- memos, notes, and To do lists

Obviously the lack of email is the primary disadvantage of the old pen and paper method of time keeping. Although, I know many who will simply print all there PIM information and stuff it into a three ring binder, or if you have money to burn, a fancy three ring binder with someone else's name on it. Just thinking about all those poor, poor little trees make me cry.

The PIM we will look at first, and which most people are familiar with is outlook express. There is a full version available commercially, that is usually bundled with the Microsoft office suite. Out look has a few interesting features that bare tauting.

Outlook seems to be able to synchronize with just about anything, from cell phones to iPods. ( Outlook 2003 and later ) Sometimes it is nice to be able review your appointments while going for your morning jog. With the latest 2007 release you can even color code your appointments by assigning an appointment to a category. Unfortunately, you only get four categories to work with. For many people, like myself, that does not give me enough flexibility for the various types of events I work with on a regular bases. Most of us have more than four categories in our lives at any given moment. This is primarily a Windows product, although a version is coming out for the Macintosh operating systems as I write this.

Fear not my Linux using friends, I won't leave you out. A couple of nice Linux based PIMs are Kontact and Evolution. Kontact is written for the KDE windowing manager while Evolution was written for gnome. However, you can use either one as most Linux applications can be ported to either KDE or gnome. Don't we just love the flexibility? Both of these applications allow for multiple color coded calendars. They will also allow you to perform the standard email, note taking, contact listing functionality we are looking for. Better yet both of these solutions are 100% free. Yep free for the taking, and while we are at it most versions of Linux are free too. Just knowing that makes me feel better about the fate of all those little trees.

All of these solutions share one little weakness that for me, just gets under my skin. Most PIMs and their valuable information live and breath on only one computer. There are exceptions however, as you could tie most things into a LDAP server. As this article is geared to personal information and not a company as a whole we going to assume you don't have a server like that. Don't feel bad, I don't have one either. You might be surprised by the next PIM we look at. It's still fairly new but it's popularity is growing by leaps and bounds. It's Google!

What?! Wait wait, just hear me out. For those who have not mastered the art of Google zen let me enlighten you. Most of you probably know about Google's web searching capabilities. Well, there more to them, so much more. Do I sound excited? You bet I do, Google has saved me a lot of time and money. It all starts by signing up for a Google email account, they call it gmail, which is free. Google has a very nice calendar web application that interfaces directly with your web browser. The calendar has all the color coding functionality for calendars and appointments. You can share this calendar out to your friends, with the ability to restrict what they can see or do with or on your calendar. The calendar can alert you, or your friends, about your appointments with emails, or even text messages.

The Gmail interface handles emails and contacts in a nicely organized means. All of this can be accessed separately or combined on a fully configurable home page Google sets up for you. With Google's tools you will be able to at a glance, check your emails, weather, message boards, to do lists, and just about anything else you would like. To top it all off, you can also create, save, update, download, and share regular documents right there online.

Google documents allows you the freedom of making word documents, spreadsheets and even presentations. You can even share them with friends by giving them access to those files. That is not a bad trick after you have suffered a USB memory stick corruption as I have. This functionality puts it over the top and made me a Google user for life. You have the ability to have access to your information anywhere you have an internet connection. You also don't have to worry about what might happen to all that information if your computer crashes or your hard drive dies. You might be saying, "Thats all nice and good but I really really want it on my computer!". Lucky you, Google has a small application that interfaces between your web tools and outlook that allows you to synchronize the two together. Bare in mind however that Outlook does not have all the functionality that Google calendar has so you are not likely to get a perfect transfer.

So out of our list of Software PIMs, Google has won out, or in the very least won me over. It has the functionality, and the cost we are looking for, and lucky us it is even easy to use. Google makes this organization and time management stuff look easy.

Hardware - PDA, laptops and smart phones
This is where things get a bit more expensive. When it comes to hardware you have two main goals, access to your information and communication. Before we move on to our options let's take a moment and look at hardware philosophy. There are basically two camp out there. The first are devices that do one thing and do it well. These include a simple cell phone, a free email address or your toothbrush. There is usually nothing overly glamorous about them. They just get the job done. The other camp are devices that do a number of things but do not necessarily have the full functionality that makes them really useful. Examples of thes are simple palm pilots, and smart phones. If you noticed I left out laptops and computers. Computers unlike most of the other devices mentioned can be made to perform just about any task, they are more like jack of all trades, and master of a few of them.

Consequently this area can not only be your biggest cost but also your biggest headache and time waster. Here are a few of the pitfalls. Many smart phones, and PDAs can be linked to your PIM software. Each one of these has a limitation. Smart phones can get email and text messages along with making a simple phone call, but they might not have the speed or the resolution for any real web usage. More impressive hand held devices can offer these things but might be found to be a bit bulky and hard to use. Both of these are a bit on the slow side when it comes to pounding out a message on those little keys. Technology can be a funny and fickle thing often with trade offs in functionality and usability. Examine the cost against the benefit. None of the smaller devices can provide you with everything your looking for. In some cases it is better to print out a piece of paper instead of lugging around 3 devices just to tend to your needs. (Sorry little trees!) If you get a really nice phone or hand held, that will allow you to brows the real web, and not just a mini menu driven set of links then Google would tie in nicely to a portable, always updated PIM solution. I have seen an increase of Internet tablets in use over the past year and while they are cool toys to play with, they just don't beat a full blooded laptop in functionality.

As for me the best balance tends to be a modest phone, my laptop, and my Google. Trust me, the simpler the solution the easier it is to upkeep and update. If you have a long or complicated ritual to get all your stuff synchronize then your less likely to be able to keep up with it all. The whole point of this is to make the technology work for us not the other way around. My advice, play around with the free software out there and find out what you like and what you don't like. You are less likely to use something that holds data wonderfully, but irritates you with bad layout designs. Also try to make do with what resources you have, and if you absolutely must buy a new toy or program, research it first. Try to to get your hands on it before you buy it so you can check it out and see if it works for your style of doing things. Usually the more flexible you and your software are the more successful you are going to be in keeping all the balls in the air.