Just a Little Luddite
I did something last week that I thought I would never do again: I bought a refill for my Franklin Planner, a 3+ pound brick of preprinted paper calendar pages, one spread per day, in the Classic size and style. And you know what? It felt good.

The funny thing was that when I brought out my beautiful leather binder -- a mid-1990s birthday gift from Mom -- from storage, tucked into the front pocket was the receipt from my Palm Pilot purchase in 1999.

I was the Palm Pilot trendsetter in my crowd. Back in those days I was taking the bus uphill to work in the morning and usually walking the two miles home in the afternoon. It was a relief to be able to take all my vital information and to-do lists and get them all into a compact gizmo that took up a lot less space in my backpack. I evangelized the hell out of the thing, and within a couple of months half my friends had one, too.

Palm Desktop is a great calendar application, too, for the most part. (There are some things I wish it handled better, but isn't that always the way?) I still rely on it for some things, like my addresses.

Unfortunately, I had to become an expert in complicated computer voodoo to get my Palm to sync under OS9, and have not once been able to get it to successfully sync under OSX, to which I upgraded more than a year ago, despite the intervention of several Palm tech types, so the utility of the portable device is lost. Thus I got out of the habit of using the Palm Pilot and came to rely mostly on Palm Desktop, which served me well for a while.

Over time, though, I found that it was easy to ignore to-do lists when they were not right in front of my face, in ink on paper. I'm very good at creating lists and to-dos and categorizing everything. But it has to be right in front of me. Having to power up the Palm or open an application window to see my to-do list just doesn't work for me. And while it is a great convenience to be able to let uncompleted tasks automatically roll over to the next day, I find that having to physically rewrite undone items on another day gives me an extra little push to get it done rather than having to rewrite it. (My laziness is complicated and multilayered.)

There's something about the immediacy of paper, the art of handwriting. I'm finding the scratch of pen on paper very satisfying.

One of the great things about being human is the ability to change your mind. I may at some point choose to try the electronic route to organization. But for now, I'm choosing to take a step back in time.
- posted by Lori @ 2:55:00 PM | permanent link | |