How to create a disposable personal organizer

[Colin Dunstan]

Heads up, Palm, Microsoft & co! The new PocketMod is gunning for you.

The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner.

Heck, it's even customizable with "Mods" tailored to your needs!

[via Makezine]

[maceyr]

Seems like a very cool idea, and I'm sure that many people will try it for the "coolness" factor of customizing it online, but it's still a paper organizer. For me, the glaring problem with any paper organizer is that it is concrete. Once everything is printed out on paper, you can't really change it except crossing it out (worse now, you can't really erase it unlike pencil). It's not dynamic like a Palm. Once you make any changes or additions to it, it's no longer sorted or organized. To look over the entire organizer to find the next important priority or task isn't efficient. It's wasting time. You waste time cutting this piece of paper, printing it out, folding it, not to mention finding the info if you've made additions or changes.

I don't like the idea of wasting paper nowadays when I have a Palm. An extra piece of paper means an extra piece of trash, or, an extra piece of paper to take to be recycled. In other words, it's work to get rid of it.

In my view, it seems great, but it fails (for me) to replace my Palm. Of course, being a converted Palm Addict, I am quite biased in my views. I will never go back to paper.

[Bob Russell]

.... and the main reason (besides my love of electronic gadgets) for my own conversion from paper planners to PDAs was fear of losing my planner and having no backup.

A similar paper solution using index cards is the now-famous "Hipster" PDA... www.hipsterpda.com.

[gadgetguru]

Nice. I wouldn't have bought a Palm if I have seen it sooner....

I think I will print a couple and keep it in my pocket, for those times when I forgot to bring my PDA....

[maceyr]

Yes, I've read about that Hipster PDA. I think this Pocket Mod is much more cool than the Hipster PDA in that you can play around and design the organizer with whichever layout so that it looks nice, etc.

But, the point is that if you have a Yahoo calendar or other free online calendar where you can print it out already, why do you need these Pocket Mod and Hipster PDA? You can print it out and still be as organized (but not as well as someone with a Palm) as these Hipster and Pocket Mods.

Much of all these "cool" things miss the point of being organized quickly. There's so much work involved that you probably enjoy doing, but then, if you look at the whole picture, you've wasted quite a chunk of time designing, selecting, printing, cutting, and everything else involved. Time is money, especially if you're a professional. Time wasted on making, designing this Hipster PDA or Pocket Mod could have reaped you much more money had you used it wisely for work than this little side project.

Most people, unfortunately, are not aware that they waste more time on "organizing" things than actually doing things. Spending some time to organize is great as long as it's a little bit of time and will actually improve your productivity. But if it actually wastes your time, then, this whole idea defeats the whole purpose of being productive and organized.

That applies to all kinds of organizational tools, systems, ideas: Day-Timer, Palm, GTD, Covey, etc. Prioritize your tasks, reminders. Keep it simple. Complicating things won't help productivity or organization.