Welcome to Palm Discovery’s four part series on why should you get a Palm or PDA device.

(Last edited Sept 15, 2008)

The previous two blogs were quite boring discussing about comparisons and reasonings between a paper organizer and a Palm. Now I’ll be discussing some of the features that a palm can do that you can see is easy and very helpful.

WHAT CAN A PALM DO?

A Palm device, even the low end, old models of the early Palm Pilots of yesteryear, can help you become better organized, allowing you to think things clearly, sort tasks, reminders, notes, balance your daily activities.

ORGANIZE ADDRESS BOOK ENTRIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT INTERACTION

Screenshot of a Palm address book in list view

Simulation of how an Address Book entry is alpha sorted immediately

Alternative Flash links: ImageShack

Flash simulation of how an Address Book entry can easily be created and how easy and quickly it’s sorted alphabetically.

The simulation will play through to the end unless I’ve inserted a pop up note for better explanation.

To continue playing the simulation, press the button.

To go back to a previous paused segment, click on the button.

To pause the simulation at any time, press the button. To continue after it’s paused, press the button again.

To scroll forwards or backwards in the simulation, click anywhere on the left (to go back earlier in the simulation), or right (to go forward in the simulation) on the progress bar.

---

It can help you organize all the address book entries of people that you need to contact from time to time, or in those special cases when someone asks you a number of a contact. A paper address book can easily become disorganized, especially if you’ve outgrown the limit of entries that the book has for a specific letter. Most people write down names and numbers on whatever scrap pieces of paper they can find and keep it in their address book, thinking that “one day” they’ll write it down in the address book correctly. Or, put them on Post it notes. But these sticky notes can fall off, stick to something else, and easily get lost. Even if you have a Daytimer organizer where you can expand your address book, the contact entries are NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER or some kind of order that allows you easy access to a specific entry. You may originally try to make a point of putting the names in some kind of order (eg. “Martin” near the beginning, “Morgan” near the middle and “Murdoch” near the end,) but eventually, there’s still disorganization within the entries. “Moore” ends up being placed after “Morgan”, “Mantel” after “Martin”, etc. So, try looking through an address book where it’s partially organized is little better than looking for a needle in a haystack. It may seem like we’re sort of organized, but I consider this “wasted time”.

Why call it “wasted time” when the information is still somewhat available but needs to take time to look up? Well, quite simply, you are using up valuable time to do something that could have been avoided if you didn’t have to look it up.

- time wasted to write down the information on scrap paper

- time wasted to transfer correctly to the address book

- time wasted to search the entry in the future since nothing is organized

- potential time wasted if you made a mistake in re-writing the information from scrap paper to address book and had to find the correct info somewhere

On the other hand, with a Palm, you enter the information correctly and DIRECTLY into the address book since you don’t need any paper. The Palm is your virtual paper, note pad, memo pad, etc. FINISHED. When you need to refer back to it to either make changes, find it quickly since it’s alphabetical and make the changes. The previous data is gone and the changes reflected immediately. Very clean and organized. Compare that with a paper address book where you see lots of cross outs, mistakes, scribbles, etc. Yuck. Remember. I used to use a Daytimer before I started using a Palm so I know how gross it can look and how disorganized it can still be, even on such an “organizational tool”.

Screenshot of an original appointment

---

Highlight the incorrectly entered information

---

Replace with the correct information. No traces of the previous error

---

Simulation of how easy it is to make changes to an appointment

Alternative Flash links: ImageShack

Simulation of how easy an appointment can be created, changed and the changes immediately reflected. No mess.

---

With a digital organizer like the Palm, it’s ORGANIZED BY ALPHABETICAL ORDER, so that when you need to look for “Murdoch”, you know that it’s located near the end of the “M”’s so you can either do a search for the “Mu” and find all the relevant results or scroll through the address book knowing how far or close you are to the entry. And, when entering the contact name and information, you don’t have to do any organization. You simply put in all the details and once done, it’s automatically SORTED IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER.

In addition, you can also organize the contacts in a Category. Suppose you have a bunch of contacts that are Business contact, you can categorize them in the “Business” category, and friends in the “Friends” category, and work associates in the “Work” category, or whatever. And when you look up the contacts in the Business category, only those in that category, sorted in alphabetical order are listed so it makes looking them up much easier. Nothing is cluttered. Everything is sorted. Unlike the paper organizer, you don’t see the traces of all the changes you’ve made to it. No crossed out parts. No arrows to direct where to look. The page looks clean.

So, rather than taking a minute or two looking for an address contact, it merely takes seconds. And unlike paper address books, where pages can be torn, or fade, or fall out, as long as the battery is charged on the Palm, the contact entry will stay there. Even if you drain the battery completely, you can usually still restore address entries and data that you’ve previously saved via a Hotsync. But, a hotsync isn’t a reliable means of a backup. It does offer some kind of a backup solution (better than nothing) but there are better back up software that can reliably restore everything back.

Let’s face it. Most paper daytimer organizers look horribly ugly, disorganized due to the amount of use, changes, mistakes editing, and revisions that are made to appointment times, address book, memos, notes, etc. People move, change email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Some do it more often than others. That only means that you end up crossing out all those old data, which adds to the clutter and ugliness because now, you have all the cross outs and arrows or stars or other flags to indicate where the new data is now located.. That’s why the paper daytimer organizers want you to get a new refill each year, and maybe even convince you to get a new leather case to go with it since over a year’s time, it no longer looks nice but scuffled, scratched, torn and ugly. In the end, it means more money for the daytimer sellers and less money for you. On the other hand, THE ENTRY AND DATA ON THE PALM ALWAYS LOOKS CLEAN AND NEW regardless of how many changes you make to it. No cross outs cross outs, scribbles, etc.

The shortcomings of any non electronic daytimer system

In the early days when I started using a paper Day-Timer organizer, actually, it was pre-Day-Timer when I was using the cheap ones that weren’t a daily entry datebook but more of those small pocket books that dentists and doctors give away, or the the pocket Hallmark calendars that card shops give out for free. In those times, I was using a system that consists of the little monthly pocket datebooks, tiny yellow Post It notes, an index card divider with dates inside a box. This was all done at work. I would put little notes about tasks and reminders and slip them into their respective place in the index card box so that on the day, I’d check on what tasks need to be done. I enter whatever relevant info in the notes regarding the task. If they don’t get completed, the note gets put in for next day. The yellow post it notes allow me to use it as a flag. I put them on folders, correspondence, etc. Although in some ways it kind of works, but it isn’t a great system.

First of all, the yellow Post-It notes are tiny. Even if I get the regular square cube sized ones, they still didn’t offer enough space to write on. Sometimes, they can easily be missed, if you don’t put them somewhere where it can be seen. The Post-It notes can easily be moved, get unstuck from where they were originally put and somehow stick onto something else. That can be detrimental if I forget to do something because the Post-It note came off (which occasionally happened), or got stuck to something else. Sometimes with all the yellow Post-It notes, you can get a bit overwhelmed with them all over a specific folder. Which one to read and which one to follow up on? Having the Post-It notes sometimes get in the way, especially if you have a stack of papers, folders to work on.

Second, the index cards system wasn’t a good system either. Sometimes, the note may be mistakenly put into the wrong date, or get missed because it was too tiny and was found at the bottom. And there’s the task of moving the notes, index cards over to the next day every day, if they aren’t done or completed or dealt with. Sure it’s not a lot of work, but it’s still work that’s prone to human error. Sometimes, notes fall out while you’re moving them from one date to another. If you forget to move it up to the current day, for one day, (example, you have a day off, sick, etc) you’re behind on the day. There’s too many factors that can screw up this system. Actually, any system that relies on you or manual labor to keep it working or organized usually fail because eventually, we fail to stay on top of things. Yes, we are not infallable.

That’s why I keep stressing that Palms or other similar PDAs or digital organizers are so much better, because they’re much more dynamic. You need to do very minimal work to make yourself better organized because the bulk of the sorting, organizing, reminding, etc is done by the Palm and it’s all done in the background, taking hardly much time at all. Everything is always presented in a clear, neat, concise way, sorted and organized. With any kind of paper or hard copy organizational tool, it is very concrete and fixed. Once you’ve gotten your schedule, daytimer, calendar, list, printed or listed in a hard copy paper format, IT’S FIXED. What’s even worse with a printed format is that you now can’t even ERASE it. So, your only way is to cross cross it out, and immediately, it now looks ugly, disorganized. With a Palm, when you’re done, it’s out of the screen. Or, if you prefer, you can have it show up as being crossed out. But, you can easily delete it, which makes it look clean again. Or, if you add something new, it’s organized according to your specifications. You can’t do that with a printed or written list without crossing something out, erasing something, or try to fit it in between the lines. It’s not possible. With a Palm, it’s easily done. And done well.

ORGANIZE AND SET UP APPOINTMENTS EASILY ON A PALM WITHOUT ANY TIME CONFLICTS

If you tend to have and set up a lot of appointments in a day, a Palm will be a better way to organize your appointment schedule than a paper daytimer. Why? Because a digital organizer will do a lot of the background work for you, compared to a paper organizer where you have to do a lot of work and input a lot of information on one sheet and transfer the same information on another sheet. If we step back from this and analyze how to set up an appointment on a paper daytimer.

An example of a typical month’s view page of a paper daytimer organizer

Example: Setting up appointment on paper daytimer

1 - CHECK OVERALL MONTH VIEW. Take a brief glance into a month’s page of any existing appointments already set up.

2 - GO TO DATE. Select the date of the appointment in your mind and go to that page in the paper daytimer.

3 - SELECT TIME AND ENTER APPOINTMENT DETAILS. Look at the available slots for a potential appointment and enter it in with relevant info on who it’s with, what time, etc.

4 - GO BACK TO MONTH VIEW PAGE AND ENTER NOTATION OF APPOINTMENT. Go back to the month’s page of appointments and make some notation to indicate that an appointment has been set up.

And now, doing it on a Palm

Example: Setting up appointment on a Palm

1 - CHECK OVERALL MONTH VIEW. Open up the datebook application in the Palm and look at the overall month page of the daytimer to view the month’s appointments.

2 - GO TO DATE. Select the date of the appointment in your mind and go directly to that date’s page.

3 - SELECT TIME AND ENTER APPOINTMENT DETAILS. SET UP ALARM FOR REMINDER(OPTIONAL). Look at the available slots for potential appointment and enter it directly in the time slot with relevant info on who it’s with, etc. If you wish to be reminded of the appointment, set up an alarm to ring based on how early you wish to be reminded or at the actual time. This is optional, but having alarms on a paper organizer is not possible.

Okay, so far, the Palm eliminates only one step of entering a notation in the month’s page. Unfortunately, not many people remember to diligently do that extra but important part and maybe make the organization process a little less organized. Now, we will look and compare both organizers when an appointment needs to be re-scheduled, which happens all too often in real life and we’ll see how few steps a Palm will take do so compared to a paper organizer.

Example: Re-scheduling an appointment on a paper organizer

1 - DETERMINE APPOINTMENT DATE TO RE-SCHEDULE. First, figure out the date and time of the appointment that needs to be re-scheduled. Depending on how the appointment is set up and what notations were made, you first have to have a way of determining the date and time of the appointment to be re-scheduled. Once determined, go directly to the date and time of the appointment to note the details (appointment duration, whom you’re meeting, etc).

2 - DETERMINE AVAILABLE APPOINTMENT DATE AND TIME. Determine what available date and times you can re-schedule the appointment by going to the month’s page where you can get an overall view of what’s available.

3 - GO TO APPOINTMENT DATE AND TIME AND COPY AND ENTER DETAILS. Go to a specific date and time after determining the empty and free time and slot. Copy the previous appointment’s details over to the new date and time.

4 - ERASE PREVIOUS APPOINTMENT DETAILS. Go back to the previous appointment’s date and time and erase out the old appointment. Forgetting to do so may waste your time when the time comes and you mistakenly prepare for the appointment that has been changed.

5 - ERASE NOTATION IN OVERALL MONTH’S PAGE OF THE APPOINTMENT. Go back to the month’s page and erase the previous notation for the old appointment and enter a new notation for the new appointment.

Before I go to the same scenario example for a Palm, I will point out some problems in some of the steps. In step 3, where you are copying the previous appointment’s details over to the new appointment date and time, there is the potential of mistakes happening. In order to effectively copy the details, there has to be a way of keeping both appointment pages accessible.

This may involve a way of bookmarking the two different pages so you can re-write it. This is fine if you have both books available, but you may not have the daytimer book for 3 months in advance. So, you’ll have to add another reminder somewhere. Yet another thing to remember to do.

Example: Re-scheduling an appointment on a Palm

1 - DETERMINE APPOINTMENT DATE TO RE-SCHEDULE. First, figure out the date and time of the appointment that needs to be re-scheduled. With a Palm, if you have a third party date book application like Datebk5 or Agendus, you can easily view a month’s appointments, based on a specific icon (if you’ve set it up). Regardless, once the appointment date is determined, go directly to the date and time of the appointment to note the details (appointment duration, whom you’re meeting, etc).

2 - DETERMINE AVAILABLE APPOINTMENT DATE AND TIME. Determine what available date and times you can re-schedule the appointment by going to the month’s page where you can get an overall view of what’s available.

3 - GO TO APPOINTMENT DATE AND TIME AND CHANGE THE DATE AND TIME.. Go BACK to the previous appointment’s date and time. Select it and in the “Details” area, select the new date and time. Click “Ok”. Immediately, the appointment is set up in the new date and time, showing up in the Month’s view with the icons and everything else intact. You don’t need to re-enter anything. Just select a new date and time.

There’s less chances that you can make a mistake since you’re not re-writing and copying something else. Of course, you can still make the mistake of putting it in the wrong date and time. If you try re-schedule an appointment when there is a conflict with another one, once you’ve put it in, you can immediately see that there is an overlap and hopefully you will be able to easily change the appointment slot.

---

Day view with the overlapping appointment from 3:30pm - 4:30pm. Notice the red line indicating the overlapping appointment

---

Week view with same overlapping appointment. The red bar indicates a time conflict

---

Month view showing the red bar in the date. The bar located at top of the date indicates appointment in am, and in the lower bar indicates pm, a full day will be full bar

---

With the Palm, the process of eliminating the re-entering of information makes re-scheduling appointments almost effortless. Also, any time conflicts can easily be seen or detected when you try to enter an appointment when there’s an existing one. Any changes made to any appointments, or any data in the Palm is automatically sorted and reflected. A lot of the background work and memorization done by hand and brain is now done by the Palm. There’s less possibilty of making mistakes since there’s less human interaction involved. Also, with the Palm, there’s the added and very helpful feature of adding an alarm to the appointment. With the Palm, even when it’s turned off, the palm will ring an alarm at the scheduled time.

ALARM FEATURE MAKES PALMS SUPERIOR TO PAPER DAYTIMERS

Screenshot of the pop up Notepad alarm that sounded and flashed on the Palm at 5:15pm

I personally find the ALARM feature of the Palm extremely important. Many times, the alarm has reminded me of appointments that I had forgotten (usually it’s because it was recently changed and at a time I usually wouldn’t expect.) For most appointments, I set the alarm about 45 minutes ahead so that it allows me some time to prepare for it (and I have been caught many times). If I had a paper organizer, I’d have to remember that morning to open up the daytimer and take a glance of the appointments and remember to set up an alarm. Otherwise, I’d most likely forget. And then suffer from this costly mistake.

I use the alarm feature quite often during my day so that’s why I emphasize on this a lot. First of all, I’ve installed extra cool sounding alarms to the default Palm midi alarm so that I can listen to sounds from the Beatles, TV themes, as well as Classical pieces and even Metallica. With some third party application like WatchMaker, Datebk5 and others, I am able to set a specific alarm for each event, thus I can easily tell and distinguish between them.

During the day, I set up alarms to wake me up, remind me to get ready to take my son to school, pick him up from school. During the afternoon, I’ve set up alarms to remind when it’s time for my son’s piano practice and other learning activities. If there are changes to the schedule, I can still easily set up the activity at a later time and set up a timer application to ring after a designated period. The great thing about the Palm alarm is that there’s NO DISPUTE about how long the time is. No one can say that we started at a specific time. We all trust that the Palm will keep track of time without any bias. When it rings, time’s up.

So, for me, the alarms are the best feature of the Palm device and just for the multiple alarm feature with different sounds alone is enough for me to justify its purchase. Who can claim that they wake up to Pachabel’s Canon, get ready to go to school the Adams Family theme, get reminded of an appointment to the Mission Impossible theme, start a piano practice session with the Back to the Future theme? It’s true! If you have other third party applications, you can actually set the alarms to actual music sounds like mp3s. Many people love waking up to their favorite music songs.

Many paper daytimer organizer users are afraid to convert to a Palm because it seems too much of a change. And in many ways, yes, it is. No longer is the Palm a hard copy daytimer. There’s no paper. And there’s always the fear that they may lose the data somehow since it’s all electronic and sometimes glitches can occur and they fear something bad happens. They have to put the trust in that the digital device won’t fail them, but they forget that many times, their memory has failed them too. How many times can you recall that you’ve “forgotten” to pick up something on the way home, or missed an appointment, etc? The possibility is certainly there, but the Palm organizer isn’t that unstable. Actually, the Palm device is very stable and usually more reliable than your memory.

The closest to a paper organizer mechanism in the Palm would be the Notepad application. If someone loves writing notes and appointments on paper, maybe they may try using the Notepad application and entering their reminders, notes in their own handwriting and then setting up the alarm. The palm will still ring at the designed time. The Palm will turn on and a pop up of their handwritten notes will be displayed (as I’ve shown in a screenshot previously). There’s the added advantage of having an alarm ring many times during the day as required.

The equivalent for a paper daytimer organizer to do so would require you to keep setting new alarms all day. So, for a new user of Palm who’s trying to convert from paper organizer to Palm, maybe trying the notepad may be the first step since he/she can still write on something in his/her handwriting but also has the option to erase and make changes quickly, effortlessly and updated immediately. No more need for liquid paper, erasers, pen. Everything is immediate. Much more time is saved rather than wasted. I personally loved the immediate reflection of changes, sorting happen that could not be done on a paper organizer.

Palm is better for the environment than a paper organizer

And don’t forget that by using a Palm instead of the paper organizer, you are eliminating paper (at least the organizer paper) from your daily routine. How many pieces of paper are used in a year’s worth of paper organizer? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s a lot. I doubt that many people will store several years worth of their paper daytimer somewhere. Most people I think will most likely throw them away when the year is done, maybe retaining a few pages. That year’s worth of paper usually ends up in the trash bin which translates to a landfill. That’s not only a waste of money, but resources.

Using a Palm means you’re not using paper so you don’t even waste a piece of paper, unless you decide to print out a memo or address book, or whatever from your Palm. That’s one piece of paper versus a large bundle. If you care about the environment, you may want to consider this aspect.

Even when the Palm becomes damaged or inoperable, there’s the option of recycling its parts. Places that do Palm repairs or sell Palm parts like GetHighTech.com will take your dead Palm for parts. Don’t throw things in the landfill where it takes many years to deteriorate. Think about what environmental impact your choice will be.

I have only touched the surface of what the Palm can do. There’s much more potential in this little device that’s even smaller in size than a pocket Day-Timer. There’s the Memopad, the Expense, the World clock, the Calculator that comes included in the Palm that already does much more than a bundle of paper can do. Rather than continuing on a lengthy topic of the other tasks that the Palm can do, which I will eventually accomplish when I discuss the applications in detail, I will stop here.

This is part 3 of the Why get a Palm? series. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, please check that posting out. Continue reading the last part of this series in part 4

Thanks for visiting and supporting Palm Discovery. If you are not reading this article from Palmdiscovery.net or palmdiscovery.com, the website you are reading it from is guilty of copying and posting my content without consent. Please visit Palm Discovery.com for the original source of the material.

Current Deals:
Kingston 64GB SSDNow V Series SATA II 2.5″ Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Notebook Bundle
FREE BUDGET SHIPPING
$30.00 Mail-in Rebate $94.95 After Rebate

Buy.com price: $124.95 Learn More (Valid 8/23-8/29)

Check out more Great Deals from Buy.com, and Palm.

: archives categories whypalm