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

A New Year of Learning: Which Planner?

A well prepared student knows at what time which lesson starts in which room. It’s not only a good thing to be in the right place at the right moment, it’s also good to be prepared for what’s going to happen. To bring the right materials and notes from the week before.

But that’s only one reason to have a good planner. Another one of course is to write down all assignments and their deadlines. It sounds so simple, but I’m amazed by the amount of students who neglect to write down this kind of useful information and then ask their teacher later on “Oh, what was it we had to do this week?”. They’re not leaving a good impression.

Flexibility is key

One very important feature of a planner should be the possibility to input data in every possible situation. We need to be able to get an appointment, reminder or deadline into the system immediately without having to remember to write it down or to write it on a piece of paper and put it on the calendar when we’re at our computer. So the work you do and the situation we’re in might influence our choice. It’s best to find our own favorite tool and adjust it to fit our needs if necessary. Read more

Will the New iPhone 3G be a Good Planner?

Planning your day seems like such a simple thing. I’ve been looking for a good solution for a long time though, and haven’t found a satisfying one yet. There is always a drawback to every system I used. I am very happy with my Moleskine Weekly Planner at the moment, but it’s not perfect - it doesn’t sync with my computer…

On the 10th of June Apple introduced the new iPhone 3G, with GPS built in, a much faster network connection at a much lower price than the original iPhone. Next to that they introduced a better synchronization service called MobileMe, which will keep all our data on our iPhone, Mac and/or PC in sync. Could a combination of those two finally provide me with a perfect planning system? Read more

How to Use an Outliner to Plan Your Project

While working on a project it’s important to have a good overview of the process. Planning the project before you start might sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people just start, without taking the time to write down what exactly has to be done and who is going to do it (in case of a group project).

For a writer it’s good to think about the story line before starting to write as well as during the process. Writing a paper or a book he might want to outline the chapters first.
While working on our own project, and this can be anything from doing research to writing a thesis or building a piece of software, it’s a good idea to think about the ’story line’ of your project before you start producing anything. Read more

Use Parkinson’s Law To Get Productive

I read about Parkinson’s Law in Tim Ferris‘ Four Hour Work Week, and I recently experienced again how this ‘law’ works. It all about deadlines, and avoiding procrastination. Do you know the moment you finish a job just before the deadline and you find out that it didn’t take as much effort as you thought it would beforehand?

The definition Wikipedia gives for Parkinson’s Law is: “[...] a humorous observation (and not a scientific law) that states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
This basically means that the same job gets bigger and bigger the more time is available to complete it. So because there is more time available it also seems like you need more time for it.

So how can you use Parkinson’s Law? Read more

Buy Discounted Software Before You Graduate

Many software developers have special prices for students and teachers. You can sometimes get up to 50% discount on the normal retail price. Looking back I realize how much software I bought after I graduated. Luckily the institute where I studies is now my part-time employer, so I can still use the educational prices when I buy a piece of software. But when you are not in this situation and you know you have to buy software for your professional career, don’t wait until you graduate!

During your studies (especially with technical studies), you are sometimes asked to do a project or make an assignment using a specific piece of software. And specialist software tends to be expensive. At school this is no problem as long as they provide you with a computer that has all the necessary tools installed.
You can also work with open source equivalents of course but these are not always available or as powerful and reliable as you often wish they would be. Read more

Make Sure You Have A Deadline

Apart from the work you do for your studies or job, you might have plans for a project on the side. Maybe you want to learn how to surf, play guitar or organize an event. But there is a lot of work to be done and you don’t want to spend every night working too. So your new plans seem less important, you might even forget about them at times, and you keep on postponing the required actions to make it work.

An example could be John, a graduate student who wants to start a band. He plays the bass and sings, and he already knows what kind of music he wants to play, and that he wants to take it serious and perform live on stage a lot. John is dreaming about this for a long time, and he doesn’t want to wait any longer.

He already started to write some songs, but Read more

When Is Good: Scheduling A Meeting The Easy Way

There are quite a few online tools to help you schedule a meeting with a lot of people. Say you’re working with a group of ten people on a multidisciplinary project and you want to schedule a meeting to talk about the design. You could send them all an email with the dates and hours you are available and ask them to tell you when they are available, compare all replies and try to find the best moment for everyone. Quite a task.

Luckily there are tools like Doodle and Meet-O-Matic that can help you with this. You tell them your availability and they will compare it with all the other invitees. I like simplicity though. Especially when it comes to simple tasks like scheduling a meeting. There’s actually only one thing you want to know: when is good?

That is exactly what the makers of When Is Good must have thought. Read more