Can you really manage your life with an electronic organizer? - includes related article on five key time-management tasks for the self-employed

Home Office Computing, July, 1991 by Sarah Edwards

Electronic organizers seem perfect--lightweight, handheld, and easy to slip into a purse, pocket, or briefcase. With these credentials, electronic organizers should be the ultimate solution to the time-management problem. But are they?

Certainly, as long as electronic organizers didn't have standard QWERTY keyboards or screens large enough to review goals, projects, and events of the day, they could not have replaced the bulky but effective paper-based time-management system I've been using for the last 10 years. Nor could computers, because I need a master calendar and master address book that I can take with me everywhere (even laptop computers are too bulky and take too long to boot up). (See "Pros and Cos: Three Time-Management Systems.") The most important criterion for any time system is that it be with you when you need it, wherever you are.

Recently, however, new organizers like the Sharp Wizard and Casio B.O.S.S. and "palmtop" computers like the Atari Portfolio and Hewlett-Packard 95LX have included QWERTY keyboards and screens large enough to make them potentially viable as total time-management tools. So last January I decided to see if it was possible to manage my life with an electronic organizer as effectively as I could with a paper system. For each time-management function (see "Five Key Time-Management Functions for the Sefl-Employed"), I tested an organize against its paper-based couterpart. I chose the Sharp Wizard for my experiment, but most of the processes I describe can be performed with other organizers.

TRANSFERRING DATA FROM PAPER

As I filed away the 1990 sheets from my trusted Dayrunner, I wondered if my usual technophobia would affect my feelings about the new piece of equipment. Indeed, on taking the Wizard out of the box, I thought, "This is going to be too difficult! It looks like a complicated calculator."

Then I sat down and discovered that the instructions were very simple. I read the scheduling section and in half an hour had entered all my fixed '91 dates. I entered all my phone numbers and addresses (74 in all) that evening while watching TV. The next day I took a few minutes to read about Memo and Outlining functions and began putting in my goals for the year. I was fully set up in just two days.

No sooner had I placed my life into this new electronic organizer, however, than a wave of panic struck. What if the unit failed and all of this information were lost? I certainly didn't want to keep a paper backup system for security.

This feeling of panic was not unlike the feeling I had the first time I put my life into a paper system. Fortunately, I've never lost my paper organizer, but I know people who have. Some people put their name, address, and phone number on the front divider along with a posted cash reward for returning the book. I've also heard horror stories about people losing electronic organizers or the data stored in them.

I feared that I might drop and destroy my organizer, which seemed delicate. In fact, since then I have dropped it five feet onto cement, without apparent damage. (I keep it in my purse, inside my Day-runner binder for protection.) I also worried that the system could crash or the battery fail. But I learned that a battery signal will notify me when I need to replace the batteries, which last four to six months.

My Wizard accepts a RAM card ($130) that makes an instant backup of all data. I feel secure because I now back up about once a week on the RAM card. My model also has a serial port so I can exchange information between organizer and computer using the PC Link II cable and software package ($129). I can transfer everyting from organizer to computer, edit it, and transfer it back. It's easy to do. However, the software takes up 462K on my hard disk. And I don't like having to make sure that the two organizers are always up-to-date with each other. But for people who work at computers quite a bit, the PC Link II would be great.

FIVE TIME-MANAGEMENT TASKS,

ELECTRONIC STYLE

Once I started, I was delighted to discover that the electronic system could do everything that my paper system once did--and more. Here's how I set up the electronic organizer to do five key tasks (see "Five Key Time-Management Tasks for the Self-Employed") and how its performance compared with that of the paper system.

Master Calendar. I have day-at-a-glance, week-at-a-glance, and month-at-a-glance options. Anything I enter once appears on all three calendars automatically. This is a real advantage. If I want to use all these calendars with a paper system, I have to move monthly or weekly entires to day spaces by hand. Therefore, to save time, I only used monthly and daily sheets in my paper system. Even the, scheduling between the two calendars was time-consuming.

Entering an event into my electronic organizer, however, does take somewhat longer than writing it down because the tiny size of the keys makes for slower and less accurate typing. I found that it took me 9.2 seconds to take the Dayrunner from my purse and get ready to write, a bit more than the 8.5 seconds to get my Wizard out and press Telephone. But writing the name and phone number by hand only took 13.8 seconds, whereas typing it into the Wizard took 20.2 seconds. Had I made a typing error, it would have taken longer.