My 30-Day paperless experiment is bringing up a lot of questions. My biggest dilemma so far has been trying to find a reliable, portable, digital calendar and note keeper. My current system is to use Microsoft Outlook for recurring and important tasks, and Microsoft Excel for strategic planning. My calendar is in a beautiful Franklin Covey planner that I’ve had for years. This planner is also the central location for other important information and is where I do my weekly planning. This hybrid system has served me well for quite some time now, I can’t even remember how long – at least 8 years.
I’ve written before about how to replace bad habits with good ones, but how does one go about replacing good habits with better ones?
The challenges I’m coming up against are these:
What if I’m in the car and need to look at my calendar? Currently, I can easily pull out my planner, while on the phone, and answer the question or make the commitment. How would that work if I used only Outlook for my calendar? I have a friend who uses both – she puts her calendar in Outlook so that others in her company have access to view it, but for her own use, she uses a paper planner. While I understand why she does this, for me, such a practice would be needlessly redundant. I don’t want others to have access to my calendar. I know that a lot of my speaker friends are displaying calendars online, but personally, when someone calls to book me, I need to make judgment calls as to how long I need to prepare for the event, what my schedule is really like based on required travel time, etc. So I can’t see using two systems – that would be creating a bad habit. Nope – not going there.
My husband’s Palm Treo is not reliable. Just this weekend his calendar did not sync so when someone called on our way to Columbus, Ohio, he had to put them off until he could get back home to answer their question. My Blackberry Curve software doesn’t work properly and I had to uninstall it to keep it from crashing my laptop – so it is not a reliable system either. I suppose I could put everything in Outlook and carry my laptop with me everywhere I go – something about that doesn’t feel right, either.
My husband puts everything in Outlook and then prints a monthly calendar to display on the refrigerator for the “at-a-glance” option. I’ve tried that before, but my schedule changes too much. I ended up printing a new monthly calendar every other day. I found that I was better off to just record everything in pencil and have one master calendar.
I am researching this issue and am open to any suggestions you have.
This, as well as other issues that I will blog about later, have brought up the real question: Do we want to be paper-less, or do we want to be paper-free? From the comments I’ve been receiving, I think most of us just want to reduce the amount of paper in our lives from the standpoint of eliminating clutter, useless bulk in landfills, and unnecessary use of our natural resources, namely, trees.
Paper is not the most efficient storage system, but it does serve a purpose. And this is what the 30-day experiment is all about.
Stay tuned . . .
Until next time,
Live Joyfully!
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Posted under Dental Practice Management, Leadership, Motivation, Success
This post was written by Debra Moorhead, Motivational Speaker, Author, and Coach on January 21, 2008
This is such an excellent question. I struggled with finding an exclusive electronic solution a few years ago but was unsuccessful. Like your husband, I had syncing issues, which causes the portability to be ineffective.
Now, I use a combination of paper and electronic. I use Outlook for my calendar. It really is the best, not to mention, my company uses it to schedule meetings. For my goals, projects, tasks, changing habits, and note taking; however, I use the Bubble Planner. There is something about writing that connects me to my dreams.
Like eating chocolate, sometimes, there’s no substitute that will truly satisfy.