Phew! It's been over a week since I blogged? Figured I had to give you people a break after that slew of articles last week, including one that I "unpublished" after reviewing it the next morning. Speaking of editing, last night "Root of All Evil", Lewis Black's show which is mildly funny most of the time and hysterical occasionally, pitted Bloggers versus Ultimate Fighters. One good crack was that neither activity requires brains; another was that bloggers are from the shallow end of the typing pool (I suppose that joke is just a ripoff of "shallow end of the gene pool", but it's still funny). Of course, I love bloggers and blogging, but you know the bad blogs I'm talking about (certain advice columnists may be lumped in here too)
Oh but here I am, doing exactly what Lewis Black and the prosecution decried: quoting other people's stuff instead of writing my own. So on to the main topic: getting organized!
Although the whole Addirol thing has made me even more eager to get organized, I've always gravitated towards making lists, jotting down notes in a central location, keeping a calendar, etc. The problem is: I often make lists that are way too long for even a personal organizing program to keep up with; I jot down notes and file them away never to be looked at again; I keep a calendar, but unless there's alarms going off to tell me when I need to look at it, it doesn't happen.
About a year ago, I purchased Now Contact and Now Up-To-Date, programs that I'd used back at my old company in the mid-90s, but never as fully as I intended. This time, I began using at least Now Up-To-Date in earnest. Since around the same time I switched over to Apple Mail (after years of being "HTML blind" with Eudora), I found myself wedded to the Apple Address Book, and Now Contact remained an occasional fling. I purchased the Now products because they promised an upgrade coming in 2008, which would change everything to work much more closely with the Apple products. In the short term, I figured I would "make it work", as they say on Project Runway, and not let another month go by without being organized. Good thing I didn't wait for that new program; 9 months later and the baby's still in beta.
Everything was going fine, although Apple Mail occasionally seemed to lose part of a message on send or receive. Also, I hated the Mac Mail Leopard version of Notes, so continued to use a third-party program (SOHO notes) to keep my desktop notes handy... until they removed Palm syncing. Around this time, I started playing around with different note programs, hoping to find something that would keep all the random thoughts that I put down in my Palm while walking around every day (I am a danger to society with my walking and typing and studying Japanese in my iPod... good thing I haven't started driving yet!). I can't remember the culprit now, but some note program's method of syncing began the deterioration of Palm Desktop to the point where Hot Syncing no longer worked, even after reinstalls, removing preference files, and all sorts of fun.
So that's when I finally bought The Missing Sync again. I had used Missing Sync back when I had a Clié (ah, Sony: such the Apple wannabe, but without the gumption to stay the course), so I knew it had good support for a wide range of systems and devices, and a responsive development team. The Missing Sync worked perfectly with my existing conduits and added all kinds of new abilities, like being able to sync photos with iPhoto, music with iTunes, etc. It seemed like the perfect solution.
Then the combined forces of two temptresses brought the whole system crashing down: the release of the 3G iPhone, and the release of OmniFocus.
I discovered OmniFocus shortly after starting my ADHD treatment, and it seemed like an ideal solution, giving me the outlining capabilities I always wanted in my Palm tasks list, while also giving me the ability to cross-classify items with "contexts" -- so, for example, I could ask (through a reasonably good interface, as with all Omni products) "show me all things that I can do while out shopping to get my projects done", and I'd see the grocery shopping for home, the supplies shopping for work, and anything else I'd noted as a to-do related to shopping, like buying a birthday gift. It seemed great, and I decided to try the desktop version.
Unfortunately, OmniFocus was designed to sync only with iCal and the Apple products that work with Sync Services. So, against my better judgement, I "forgot" all about the hell I experienced when I first tried to use iSync with my Palm, and I did a test sync with Missing Sync talking to the Apple programs instead of the Now programs. I figured that I would do this in an afternoon, and if it worked, I'd try it for a while, but if it didn't, I'd simply switch back to the Now programs before my data got too far out of sync.
Well, that was a nice idea, but Apple, much as I love their style, also loves trapping users in a box. A flimsy cardboard box. Racing down a hill towards a ravine. With a hole in the bottom so your butt is getting scraped the whole way down. Melodramatic roadrash metaphors aside, the problem was that once I had synced with iCal and friends, Missing Sync no longer seemed happy working with the Now conduits. First I noticed that my "ideas" category, where I jot down any quick ideas I have, disappeared from Now, although it still thankfully existed on my Palm. Then my attempts at syncing with Yojimbo (another note-taking program, since iCal doesn't have a notes feature) began to slow down and eventually crashed.
I thought maybe I'd live with iCal for a while anyway, since everyone else seemed to enjoy it. And although I love "power-typing" on my little Palm Centro keyboard, I fooled myself into thinking I could get used to the iPhone on-screen keyboard. However, I was sensible enough to test this all out on my iPod Touch first... or I would have been if I'd gotten than far in the experiment.
Going into iCal to sort through my 2,000+ task items (I use task lists for everything from the music I want to buy to books I want to read to quick one-liners about ideas... as well as for daily to-dos), I discovered a ton of duplicates, but no tool for deleting them (unlike in Now products, where it is understood that occasionally sync glitches happen). On top of that, many of the duplicates had been changed so that one version was lowercase while the other had the mixed casing I normally use (yes, I try to write correctly in my notes, too, so I don't judge myself later for poor grammar). Worst of all, many items had been moved to the "unfiled" category!
So, I decided I'd just spend the afternoon cleaning up the data. The whole point of this exercise was to clean out the decade's worth of digital detritus on my Palm anyway (I've had a Palm since the first ones, and although I did stray briefly to a Symbian device, I never let go of the Palm). "No problem," I thought. "Apple writes great easy to use tools, so I'll just see if I can't drag and drop my way out of this mess."
Sorry to leave you hanging, but unfortunately I've been writing this while waiting for about half a dozen syncs to finish, using my latest software selection, which also was working fine until I let it near Apple Sync Services. As a result of these mis-syncs, the notes I took about why I hate iCal have all disappeared. So I'm going to give your eyes a rest until I find them or give up and write them all down again, and then I'll continue with part 2 of this cautionary tale.
