Are Palms passé?

I still have a number of folks who join the GTD_Palm list every week. Usually new members exceed posts per week. I am starting to wonder if the whole PDA market has come to a dead end. It's true that they are still coming out with phones with PDA features. I'm not interested in those at all. I use my digital camera part of my Zire 71 a lot but don't see the need to replace it with a PDA for that. I still plan using my Palm, but my life has slowed down enough that it's really not necessary for me. I don't see anything out there that I like. I'm starting to feel that I won't replace this Palm when it dies. I'll likely revert to paper, given the options out there. I can still use the planning tools in Linux.

I find that a lot of GTD is truly ingrained now. I can plan out a project and usually write next actions that can be done. I do things immediately if I can do them in under 2 minutes. I am still fairly organized. I will not be living the life of an urban professional by any stretch of the imagination. So my focus will be on old ways of tracking and organizing farm life. I guess that this blog has a limited life expectancy and that I will move on at some point. It will be time someday to hand off my role in the list as well. It's been interesting and meaningful, but it has a very minor role in my life now.

Updated system and a link

A commenter asked about week DA. You can download it from here. Just scroll down the page a bit. You'll need a DA launcher too (I have pTools, so I use that). When I'm trying to find DAs, I do a search on "cute funky DA" and it takes you to the main site. Many DAs have been translated, so don't hesitate to try one out.

I use WeekDA whenever I want to search on something by week, rather than date. I have started using diary posts, where I put in both a week date and the date I wrote the info. My diary template looks something like :~::DIARY::06wxx:Mon 2006.05.01: I use this to record anything of note that I might need to find again. I got the idea from the diary in Emacs.

The new version of Memoleaf is very handy. I have templates for some of my monthly memos. And I use the tags for any reference memos. For projects, I use wikinames and PSLink. I've been using MobileNote and found that I was spending way too much time trying to format how things looked. So I changed how I set up my project memo. I use Objective, Tasks, and Notes sections. The tasks all have the project name after them. Whenever I decide to work on a task, I use PSLink DA to link to either a todo or datebook entry. Since I have the project name after the task, this links back to the original memo. Works sort of like a back link. I've added another DA, ApptViewer, which gives me a quick overview of the datebook. And I have my todo list set up with contexts for categories, so I have a quick overview of what I can be working on.

After playing around with the planning tools available in emacs, I've decided that they just don't work for me. I'm just going to use Jpilot on the desktop. I had too many items scattered around in different systems. It helped me learn emacs and I'm going to continue to use it for other cool tools. It's just too much work to use it to sync to my Palm. I even found a script that would let you read Lifebalance files, but haven't been able to get it to work. I needed to simplify again.