With the advent of this new (and hopefully successful) business enterprise of mine, I find myself reeling from my schedule (and I'm not even up and running yet!). At my old job, I had someone doing my scheduling and I would just show up and get my jobs every morning. The "only thing" I had to worry about was my personal calendar. For this, I just used a very small leather bound weekly planner (and wrote everything really, really small).

This is all out the window. Since being unceremoniously dumped, I've been using Outlook as my calendar of choice. I have (or will have) many appointments during the day as well as my usual hectic schedule in the evenings. This will be just too much to be writing down in a small planner (or large one, for that matter). As I drive around the city doing my work, I'll likely be taking calls which will involve scheduling.

Since I can't take my Outlook calendar with me (unless I keep printing off weekly sheets every day), I'm wondering about Palms. I notice that they can synch with my PC Outlook. This seems desirable. I'm thinking there has to be a catch. Tonight I looked at a model that was $100, and another that was $200. They both seem to have the calendar synch feature, so I'm not really sure if one is as good as the other.

Or, is there another way in which I may keep my sanity (calendar wise) that I have not considered?

i'm still "old school", plus i take a lot of notes, jotting things down during visits, meetings, etc. i've tried the "palm" revolution a couple of times, but keep going back to paper.

my preference: http://www.franklincovey.com

Although I have never tried the FC line, I used to use a (written) planner. I think it was Daytimers (or something like that). Given my inherent distrust of anything that runs on batteries, that may be an option.

I would suggest a phone upgrade. I have this one:

Kycera 7135 Smart Phone



It's similar to a BlackBerry, but I like the footprint much better.

too bad you didnt post this before i threw my old and very unused palm *pilot* in the trash...yes the trash. i would suggest an ibook.

edit to add in the word pilot. i didnt want anyone thinking that i actually threw away my palm.

Hey, you can get some cheap Palms on ebay. I got one for like $60, and it has a memory card slot so that if my battery dies, and I lose my reserve memory, everything important is backed up on the card.

It's just a thought, Palms are pretty cool, they have alarms, note pads, can store MP3s, PDFs, etc etc.

I've been happy with my Palm. IMO it's much better and convenient than pen and paper. Just don't do like me and try to charge your battery in another country without verifying whether or not your PDA is dual voltage.

Ok.... after much consideration, hand-wringing, pondering and....... um.... cyphering.....

The winner is....... Franklin Covey planner. Picked it up the other day. The "old school pull" of pen/pencil and paper was too much to resist. Bill, you had a good point (as did the rest of you!) about the "notes". That was the first question the sales person asked me... "will you be taking many notes during the day?" After thinking this through a bit, I picked up the Monarch (large) version. The next size down was a close second, but I like the extra room. Pretty sure I did the right thing... you should see the "notes" page from my first two days....

So, what day is it???