How to Use the iPhone as a Planner

In June I asked the question: Will the New iPhone 3G be a Good Planner?. I didn’t have an iPhone myself back then, as it wasn’t available where I live. Since august I’ve been using one though, so this is a good moment to get back to that question and see how the iPhone holds up to the expectations I had back then. A lot of people visited this website because they searched for “iPhone planner” in Google, so I guess there’s quite some interest in such thing.

To my knowledge there is no application that can do everything you need to create a waterproof planning system. But can you make your iPhone a good planner by combining a few applications? This was one of the main reasons why I bought an iPhone in the first place. I was using a Moleskine weekly planner at the time to hold my appointments and to-do lists. I used iCal mainly for setting reminders. I played around with different GTD applications, but they Read more

Use the Unschedule to Overcome Procrastination

“Keep starting. Finishing will take care of itself.”       - Neil Fiore

Procrastination is a problem for many of us. There is a lot of work on our plate, but something is keeping us from starting. Maybe it’s the fear of failure, of being judged by others, maybe it’s perfectionism and criticizing ourselves too much. The work we have to do seems so overwhelming we rather look for something else to do to forget about it. The feeling we “have to” do things doesn’t make it easier.

The Now Habit, a book by Neil Fiore, provides helpful tools to overcome procrastination, and enjoying leisure time without feeling guilty about not doing anything. One of those tools is the “unschedule”. What is the unschedule and how can we use it to overcome procrastination? Read more

Would a Paperless Life Make You Happy?

As a follow-up on my previous post A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork I would like to take a closer look at what can be done to get rid of as much paper as possible. A few practical tips.

Eliminate

First of all it’s a good idea to eliminate as much of the incoming paper as possible. Let’s take some time to make a list of all sources of paper sent to us. Bills, obligations and notices, promotional material, things like that. Do we really need them? Do we read all that stuff?

A lot of the information banks and telecom providers send can also be viewed online. A lot of companies offer the possibility to unsubscribe from these mailings and just send an email with a link to the information. If companies send us promotional offers we can Read more