Tech and paper – in perfect harmony?
January 5, 2009 1 Comment
As Management Consultants we are always tuned in to change – that is of course where most of our fees come from. But just as dogs tend to look like their owners, I find myself in a constant state of change. The subject of this instability is around working methods and kit.
I suffer the necessity that is imposed by working for a significantly sized company – the company laptop. It’s a decent Dell, quite small with good battery life and reasonable performance. Not bad so far, but it is theirs, and subject to a range of limitations on what can I can do with it. The standard configuration means I can’t add applications that might make life easier or add some light relief whilst out (iTunes is out of the question). We have some quite tight security controls as well that add to the straightjacket mentality.
It’s difficult to escape from this machine as the working day can be quite long, and I need to maintain a calendar and contact list in the company Outlook. Recognising all the good ideas of the various productivity sites and blogs, I keep only one calendar as I can’t imagine the confusion of separating personal and business commitments in different media.
Very soon though, I realised that the laptop is not the centre of my universe. I rebel against those engineers’ meetings where everyone is plugged in to their computer tapping away, not always on the meeting topic, whilst presenters drone on. I have tried hard to have short meetings with eye contact, discussion and agreement. That tends to mean paper, so we now have two streams of content.
In the daily working pattern, the laptop is not always on, or even nearby for large parts of the day, so I use an HTC Touch smartphone to extend the electronic content slightly further afield. The Touch is brilliant and the best PDA/phone I have ever bought (there are better versions since but this one works well for now, and they are far from cheap). I know there are many that live entirely by their Palm or Blackberry, but I cannot bring myself to commit everything to a small device that could fall into the Thames in a clumsy moment, and good though it is, it misses that tactile joy of a good pen and paper for jots and doodles and impromptu capture of ideas and inspiration.
So I go back to basics and paper, and this is where my problem lies – settling on a style or form and using it to its best effect has become an elusive ideal. Not unlike that search for the method and kit to make the best cup of coffee whilst revising at university.
Over the last fifteen years I have been an early adopter of Filofax, used TimeManager, and Franklin Covey, usually in A5 size as I like the more compact and lightweight form (my other quest – to travel light but fully effectively). I have got into a habit of printing the Outlook calendar each week, cropped it to A5 and used a fabulous Franklin Covey binder as the focus of all personal management actions. I then made the mistake of experimenting with GTD and found the management actions going back to the electronics. The A5 is also flawed as I had to spend a lot of time on print settings and cropping paper, and using a proprietary hole-punch that sits in my office at home and is never to hand when I need it somewhere else.
Learning from that, I invested in a Filofax A4 leather binder with four rings – slimmer, and with a twelve tab index keeps limited amounts of current project papers in one place. I do still like the A5 notepad though – W.H. Smiths do a range of inexpensive wire bound soft cover notepads that I have used for a couple of years and keep coming back to as they are light, small and available at any high street or railway station. Are they functional? Yes, elegant? Not quite, so I was delighted to receive this Christmas, after a volley of hints, a black leather cover by Franklin Covey, designed for wire-bound notepads.
So I now use four media to manage my life – the laptop, the smartphone, the A4 binder and the A5 notepad. It sort of works but I’m sure there are improvements that could be made and this is my quest for the coming year. Alongside the general plan to streamline all I do, make more time for the things I want to do and be generally more productive and effective, the search for the perfect working methods and tools continues.
And of course, in the background is the home computer setup with iTunes and all the other things I can’t use on the company laptop, but that is a different story altogether – Macintosh anyone?
