PIM's part III - Time & Chaos II by Dan Butler This article first appeared in TNPC #6.05

We have been discussing various Personal Information Managers (PIM's) that I use to keep track of information. This issue I'll tie up a few loose ends and tell you about a free PIM that might meet your needs. If you missed the first articles in the series you can find them here:

http://www.thenakedpc.com/dan/

Many of you who downloaded Time & Chaos wrote to tell me how much you liked it. The main question I received was why I don't use just one PIM to store my data. Specifically why I keep certain things in Ecco Pro while keeping my address book and calendar in Time & Chaos.

At one point I kept my addresses and calendar in Ecco Pro. It did a fine job. My wife kept her information in Time & Chaos. It too did a fine job. But we had our data scattered across two applications. Coupled with the fact that I used Ecco at my office, it made for a mess. So we decided to just use one application. Time & Chaos got the nod for it's ease of use and the fact my wife and children were already up to speed on it. Of course getting up to speed on Time & Chaos is about a 10 minute process which made the decision even easier.

The truth is I actually prefer a paper based address book and calendar when possible. Why? I just like paper and pens. I like to see my own handwriting. I like nice pens. Plus it gets me away from the computer which is always a good thing (according my wife). I'll have more to say on this in a later article.

My address book and calendar are paper based then I update the master address book and calendar when I'm at the computer. The specific paper planner I've used for the past few years is the Planner Pad. It's inexpensive and does just what I need. You can find them at:

http://www.plannerpads.com/

Some people asked about Palm Pilots. I've tried handhelds in the past but just didn't want "one more thing" to carry around. That plus my love of paper and pen makes it unattractive to me. All of the PIM's we are discussing will synchronize to handhelds either natively or with an add-on program.

The Palm comes with a nice little PIM called Palm Desktop that runs on Windows or Macintosh computers and synchronizes to the Palm Pilot. You can download and use Palm Desktop for free. It may meet your needs just fine and if you ever move to a Palm Pilot you are ready to go. Just synchronize your data. I have not used Palm Desktop but talked to several people who find it meets their needs just fine. Get more information and download Palm Desktop here:

http://www.palm.com/

Next issue I'll talk about loose bits of information. Those little scraps of information you want to reference someday that just don't fit in a PIM.

(c) 2003, Dan Butler
You can reach Dan Butler at:
danbutler@TheNakedPC.com