All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I’m barely using my Tungsten E Palm PDA (organizer), so I’ve switched to Google Calendar and Remember The Milk. Fortunately, there wasn’t much to switch over — I’m not that swamped.

Or, my head isn’t cleared out and nothing has been written down for months. =/

Although I keep my email inbox at zero most of the time, I’ve been off the productivity wagon for awhile. I gotta get back to it. One foot after the other, right?

Some surprises are good. However, the ones associated with school aren’t.

I wasn’t keeping track of my syllabus, so I found out that this Thursday, I have yet another huge exam for this philosophy class, “Great Religions of the World.”

How many of you look at your syllabus on a daily basis? How about your calendar? That’s what I thought. The syllabus is reference material. You won’t look at it until you need to, or when it’s too late.

Lesson: The moment you get your syllabus, enter the important dates onto your calendar. When you’re doing your weekly review, you’ll be able to see when that next important paper or exam is coming.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to figure out how to schedule my study times before Thursday. I need an 84 to get a “C” before the final exam. (I also need to make a mind map and checklist for stuff I need to do at the beginning of a school semester or quarter, but that can wait until after the exam.)

I’m torn right now when it comes to calendaring. I’ve been using my Palm Tungsten E for a couple years, and I still love how quick and simple it is to navigate. When it comes to Google Calendar and 30 Boxes, two major web calendar applications, I’m not sure which one I can easily convert to using.

Why? I just want to be able to send people a link to my calendar, and they can see if I’m busy or not.

Now that 30 Boxes has been around for a year, and I have a faster internet connection at work, maybe it’s time to give them a shot. Or, do you think Google Calendar beats 30 Boxes?

If you use CompanionLink for Google Calendar, how’s it working for you? Does it now support recurring events?

What are your thoughts for any of this?

I finally spoke to Jeremiah (from CompanionLink) today.

What’s the issue? After the first sync, subsequent syncs prompt if I want to delete events from Palm Desktop, even when none of the data changed.

Jeremiah walked me through some steps to find out what was going on, and I ended up having to send some log files to him so the programmers could look at the issue. It’s sort of over my head, but I’m glad to help troubleshoot this weird behavior. He’ll be contacting me in a day or so after they check it out.

Oh, and Jeremiah’s cool, man. A few of them at their office have red Swingline staplers! (Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays…)

Refer to “Awesome use of Google Calendar”

I briefly wrote about 30 Boxes right when it first came out early February. I played around with it for a few days, and I liked it quite a bit.

The reason I stopped using it was because my main calendaring tool is my PDA, specifically, my Tungsten E. That’s my right tool for the job. Barely any of my friends have a calendar of some sort, leaving the task only to their minds (at least, from what I’ve seen). This, my friends, is a post dedicated to them and anyone else that’s in a similar situation to me.

Why would I use 30 Boxes?

Easy tracking from other sites, especially with RSS feeds. Keep tabs on other people important to you. Print view looks simple, yet effective. Entering new items is a breeze with the One Box entry. Tags, map links, add colors, and SMS alerts. They have a vision: Track, organize, and share. Sounds good to me.

Real world use: Write things down during the day, then add the appointments to your calendar. Print out your calendar for offline use for the current and following day. Use that sheet throughout your day for adding stuff to your calendar. For more efficient entries when physically writing stuff on paper, use Todoque.

Why wouldn’t I use 30 Boxes?

I’m not always online, and it doesn’t have all the features like other more complete applications. I don’t like learning new things, especially having to sign up for it. I already bought DateBk5 that adds more functionality to my Palm PDA.

Respect the company for aiming at a specific audience

I can understand that you can’t please everyone. If you make that point clear, then people can’t blame them for not implementing certain features. If you tried to please everyone, then the whole application would become bloated, right? So, when using this service, keep this in mind before you complain to the developers.

Conclusion

I believe anyone without some sort of calendar should look into using 30 Boxes. If you have a bunch of calendars spread out all over the place, you might consider this service to consolidate the chaos.

I’ve been messing with 30 Boxes for the past couple days, and it’s not too shabby. The web integration with other sites is pretty cool, such as my local weather and upcoming.org. Adding new items is easy, too. In my opinion, it’s simple elegance.

However, my main gripe is that I can’t import my calendar from my Tungsten E/Palm Desktop program. Synchronizing it would be even better. But, I’m pretty sure the developers (Julie, Narendra, and Nick) will get there eventually. For now, they’re just trying to get the bugs worked out, and I’m okay with that. At the moment, I’ve got two weeks entered into my calendar and I’ll just go by that for now.

It’ll be awhile until I pass this onto my friends. But, I have faith in these developers. Things seem to be moving along quite nicely, so as long as they’re plugging away at bugs and features, I’ll keep trying to find things to say in the 30 Boxes forums. If you’re trying it out, you better do the same…

I like 30 Boxes, but it still has quirks to tend to. I know, who doesn’t? Anyway, a tip for those who are messing with it: don’t use quotation marks in tags (a la Flickr). My calendar is currently inaccessible. Please fix it soon, fellas! (Update: Solved! Back to messing around with it.)

The Beauty of the Recurring Task

I think I’ll input more in my calendar. I haven’t been as disciplined lately with GTD, so I need to get back on track. Using recurring tasks frees up my task list so it just has one-time tasks that need to be done. (more…)