What’s your pointless obsession? It’s got to be pointless and yet take up lots of time that really you would be better spent working in a soup kitchen or raking the leaves.

Mine is Personal Information Management. Somebody invented the concept of PIM and they set in motion a train that would mean I would spend hours searching for ways to the same thing over (and over) again. The goal is, as always, a reasonable one: to synchronise calendar & address information between the office and home (including my Treo) using different calendars. It should, in theory, be easy but it’s not. I’ve moved the criteria recently to search for an online WAP-accessible calendar which means I could have a smaller, cheaper ‘phone than the Treo for times when it’s not really appropriate (or practical) to take it with me.

The plan was to use Yahoo Calendar as the gateway between home and the office – synchronising all – but it doesn’t quite work. I find the Yahoo-Outlook synchronisation causes too many errors when synchronising (although it’s fine to overwrite). Yahoo won’t synchronise my Palm Desktop at home (although it will sync with the Treo). I can export my Palm address book via a file upload to Y Calendar but the date book option fails every time. Yahoo Calendar’s WAP implementation works so it would satisfy that criteria if it would hook into everything else properly. I wonder if anybody really does use it or if it’s just a nice ‘we have’ gimmick?

Now, I’ve spoken about all this before. It’s pointless and really very unnecessary. I really can’t see my address book and/or calendar options are any more demanding than anybody else on the planet: I might be trying to be a little sophisticated with my use of them but I don’t think my uses are different – I’m just trying not to have multiple out-of-date copies of things. Of course, it’s a geeky thing to want and it’s frustrating that nothing out there does what I want.

But (in my best Points of View voice), why-oh-why do I choose this as my time consuming obsession? Am I alone?

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

Mobile phones and PDAs – something I try to talk about occasionally and not very well. It’s at times like this that I bow to somebody with superior writing and thought processing capabilities. Therefore, gentle reader my I present Lance Arthur: The MBEN Cometh. If you read these words of wisdom you’ll understand what I was trying to say.

On this day…

2005: Blog Madness
2004: Eleven Years In The Big Smoke
2003: Gangs Of New York

At some point – I do not remember exactly when – I needed to start to organise my life. I was, no doubt, a typical teenager and needed to keep friends’ addresses and phone numbers in a book. Then I needed a diary to organise my life (in fact, I am fairly certain my first diary was about 1984). So I started keeping an appointment diary. The addresses and telephone numbers were in the back. Of course, back in the dark ages, I didn’t need to keep track of email addresses and mobile numbers. Each Christmas as a new diary was purchased for the forthcoming year the addresses/phone numbers were cleaned up and entered into a new book. Life was easier.

When I went to university, my diary became more of a necessity as I needed a way to organise. Sometime after I started work, it morphed into a Filofax, which helped organise a little more but weighed considerably more. But still, the pages with the telephone numbers kept getting cleaned up each year. When I lived in a flat, I started to need to keep more names and numbers (you know, the people you have to pay bills to, the man who fixed the leak in the roof, etc.).

In 1997 (I have the exact date somewhere), I bought one of the original generations of Palm Pilot (specifically the Palm Pilot Professional as it had more memory than the personal version), and life – at least when it came to diaries and personal data – changed forever. Seven years on, I can conclude that the addition of a digital diary (or personal information manager, as they are known) has made life both easier and more frustrating in equal measure. Now, with the addition of mobile telephony to the device, I yearn for a simpler way.

I will be writing more later, and when I have done, I hope that somebody who develops these devices will come across my words and think about ways to come good on the promise of making the management of our personal data banks easier.

On this day…

2006: Bye Bye Juan Pablo
2006: And We’re Back
2005: Yummy
2002: I Like Yahoo!