I only mention it because I know you do work to help me avoid this stuff... this showed up in my rss feed.

Yeah...

We've been talking about this at work lately, "creating an expectation of service" and how it's better to not create one if you aren't going to make it a key part of the workflow.

I think the iPod and iApps are enough of the background noise in my life now that I probably can't filter for them meaningfully, and I know I'm going to think about them as separate categories less and less. This whole post, for instance, didn't even strike me as a "mac" post... just a "things I'm trying to do to organize my life" post.

Maybe it's best to eliminate the expectation instead of only doing it half-way.

On the topic of work flow and house keeping, no book is better than "Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House", by Cheryl Mendelson. It's not about time management per se, but about how to understand house cleaning, and why to do things in a certain way or certain order. It's hailed as the best book on the subject in 100 years, which I'm quite willing to believe.

apple devotee that i am, if i didn't already have a broken palm and an underused ipod, i would still be using the palm. they really are pretty good (i always stuck with the b&w ones; don't know about the upper-scale color ones). you're right that there's no search interface for the ipod. meh.

Isn't there some plugin for MT that says "if there's a lower-case 'i' followed by an upper-case letter, it's probably some mac garbage" ? :)

Thanks for the book reco, Sven. The Amazon reviews left me a little uncertain, but maybe I'll give it a try anyhow.

Re: Palm: I went ahead and recharged my Palm and resynced it. It keeps just a subset of my calendars (the planner, social, and general work), and I'm thinking of dropping the planner from the sync: If I'm out of the house, I don't want to be worrying about what I had planned for that particular moment because, well, I'm elsewhere. Also, it gets sort of cluttery with the planner calendar around.

I think part of my resistance to the Palm is how much I once tried to do with Palm devices: Vindigo, a chat client, mail, etc. etc. That stuff all drove me crazy. It's a very nice address book, calendar, and repository for pictures of Ben, though, and I have a decent shopping list proggie for it. But I read about people who keep their brains in their Palms and I'm filled with fear and trembling: I smashed one falling off a bike, and I've had two others die of crap design (a Visor Edge) and wear (a Visor Deluxe).

It's an expensive thing to make an indispensable part of the workflow.

fwiw, i'm finding that book to be awfully thick. it's got a good intro, but it's also got bits i have to skip or i'll get stuck. it's one of the books you keep because it's got everything, like a medicial reference book, but i'm interested in the books you reccomend for a more practical approach.

i'm embarrased to admit i've been reading a site called "flylady" (flylady.net); i'm mentioning it because it's helped shift how i approach cleaning and routines, but i'm embarrasses because its target audience is obviously not me (or you), and i have to keep reading around the tone to get the content. so if you look at it, don't hold mit against me. blushes

you're right: palm does the basics very well. i had a visor once that never got the calendar syncing thing right, and so i never got another one because if it doesn't do the calendar, what good is it? to pad voodoopad doesn't sync with it, though. :P