The Wily Filipino

Fiddling.

1. It's amazing how much time I can squander trying to learn how to become more productive and more organized. Luna absolutely nails the experience in a blog post from last month. The problem with me is that I implement GTD and various "lifehacks" in spurts -- organizing my desk, or whittling my email inbox to zero -- and then watching it pile up until I get all GTD-frenzied and do it again six months later. I never even got to finishing David Allen's book, but hey, at least I got my folder system set up.

2. Freeing myself from the tyranny of Outlook isn't as simple as it sounds, especially if you're chained to a Palm-Outlook setup like me. I love how the rest of Office 2007 looks and works -- Word is just fantastic, for instance -- but Outlook 2007, despite its aesthetic qualities, is unforgivably slow, even with something as simple as previewing a newly-arrived email in a separate pane. Like most people, my Outlook is burdened with a huge .pst file that I really have no intention of archiving at the moment. (Organizing the inbox emails into folders is one thing; actually deleting and/or archiving the email in those splinter folders is another.)

First, I fiddle around with Plaxo. This web app seems to synchronize with just about everything, so I download the Outlook plugin and perform the sync operation. It's absolutely seamless, dumping my contacts, to-do lists, calendar events, and notes into Plaxo. (It also syncs with Google Calendar.) But I realize this doesn't solve my Outlook problem -- indeed, it only really works as an online "backup" of sorts, and I don't want another entry point. (It also doesn't help that the interface seems a little slow in loading the events, in contrast to the faster Google Calendar.)

Second, what to do with all that email. Prior to leaving for the Philippines for vacation with Izzy, I set up my SFSU account to forward all my email to my Gmail account. It works perfectly.

Since most of my online activities seem to be centered on Google anyhow (Google Talk, Google Maps, Google Reader, etc.), I take the plunge and migrate all my mail in Outlook to Gmail via gMOVE. (And in case I'm offline, Google Desktop puts all those emails at my fingertips in any case.) gMOVE is ridiculously easy, moving all my email messages (though I did that folder by folder, just to be sure) to Gmail, and most important, preserving the date and time they were originally sent. (One drawback: it doesn't keep the Outlook folders I placed them in, so I had to do searches for some keywords / names and label them -- which practically work as different "folders" anyhow.) gMOVE also transfers calendar events and contacts to Gmail / Google Calendar.

So far, so good -- everything in my Outlook has now been successfully migrated online. (I then deleted -- yes, I did -- most of the non-essential email from Outlook, now making my .pst leaner and meaner. Hopefully. The program certainly loads up faster now.) But that's the main problem with Google Calendar: it doesn't deal with Outlook to-do lists. (Yes, I know Remember The Milk works with Google Calendar, but there's no way I'm retyping my to-do lists.) So now I had my task list in Plaxo, but my online calendar of choice was Google Calendar. (And it still looks nothing like the general purtyness of the Outlook Calendar.)

And you folks (if you're still with me) realize I'm forgetting something here, right? That's right -- my Palm Pilot.

I use Agendus on my Palm -- surely one of the best programs made for the Palm, period -- but Agendus for the Windows desktop just looks kind of clunky. Lots of bells and whistles, to be sure, but there's something about it that looks Windows 95ish. After messing with the sync options -- you don't even want to know about how I was trying to make it play with My Life Organized (it doesn't) -- I finally got it to work properly. So now I could work with a Palm-Agendus setup -- except that it doesn't sync with Google Calendar or Plaxo. (No, I don't have a Treo or any of the later Palm models, so I can't sync wirelessly.) And that Win95 interface was getting on my nerves.

Still, there was something about the idea of having everything online that was still appealing to me. The next step was CompanionLink for Google Calendar, which, amazingly enough, lets you sync directly between your Palm and Google Calendar, bypassing Outlook and Palm Desktop altogether. This worked well too, except that I was getting duplicate entries, and... again, that lack of a task list in Google Calendar.

To make a long story short, I've ended up with my old Palm-Outlook setup -- no more mail though, just everything else (mostly that beautiful Outlook Calendar). The Plaxo plugin in Outlook still syncs with Plaxo, which in turn syncs with Google Calendar -- in short, the contact lists / calendars located online will simply serve as backup (or as different data entry points if I'm without my Palm and away from my home desktop). I may still go with the Palm-Agendus setup, but there's little point in paying for another program.

3. Plus I've (temporarily) ditched my Twitter updates -- didn't work well with Facebook, seemed to be down a lot, didn't work well with web feeds -- and moved to Jaiku.

4. And yes, you got that right -- I finally took the Facebook plunge after receiving three invitations in a week (and three years after D from 12 Mile told me about it). I need more friends to add to my 36!

5. Also, I'm sending a nice big package to my editor by the end of this week. It's really getting done. I hope it works out.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 8, 2007 12:14 AM