Computers and Such

I have a paper calender, well actually, I have two, no three, wait, four, five, six paper calenders. I don't write on all of them--just three. My secretary (who is not really my secretary since I am worse than Murphey Brown in that department) does not have my calender. She has to physically come into my office and look at the desk calender to find out where I am. My other staff members who are sometimes responsible for arranging my court dates have calenders on their computer. They e-mail the information to me. I don't know why I can't simply access their computer, but that's not to say it isn't possible, it's just that I don't know how and when I've asked them, they don't either. I'm paying them next to nothing and providing the bear minimum tech support, so I do not ask for more.

Now, we had a great speaker at ABWA a few months back who spoke about getting organized. For 18 years I have manually taken my desk calender and updated the calender that I carry with me, but as I get older my brain does not want to store as much info and I'm finding it harder and harder to trust the calender in my hand. Last week I was out at a client meeting and I got a call on my cell phone. No one ever calls my cell phone. I am not much of a cell phone person. I ignored the call and apoligized to my client for the interuption. When I found out the call was from my office, I was going to give them an earful for bothering me at a client meeting (jumping the gun, assuming it wasn't important, hence my attraction for good secretaries). They were calling to tell me that my other client was there for her appointment that wasn't on my calender. Lo and behold back in my e-mails was a note and a confirmation from me for a meeting. I completely missed it on all my calenders. It reminded me of a nifty thing one of my clients sent me by e-mail that went directly to the calender on my computer (that I didn't even know existed). There has to be a better way.

There is. It's something called pdf, but I refuse to go there. You carry it separately from your phone--I already carry too much stuff. OK, it is smaller than the paper calender that I carry around, but it will be too much typing--I can't type on that tiny little thing. Well the speaker at ABWA said, you don't type on the little organizer--you type on your computer and sync it to the organizer. That sounds so much better. And I am pretty sure that I already have a calender on my computer. I'll bet if I go into Outlook and click on that thing that says Calender--it will be right there. And, I'll further wager that if I go into the network drive at the office, I'll even be able to go into my staff's calender and they could go into mine--maybe that's pushing it.

Anyway, I don't want to carry a phone and a pdf, so I'm done. Then I get an e-mail about the iphone, which I am already kind of in love with. It has a way to sync into Microsoft Outlook--there's my calender and it's a phone. I can ditch the paper and have everything in one place. What a wonderful dream. Someday that will be me, glued to my phone surfing the net. I wonder if I can write my blog from my phone.