Planning Vista, Mobile Device Center, Pocket Plan, Scripting and More
Here are short summaries of just a few of the great posts published daily on the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine blogs. We encourage you to read the complete post, post your own comments, and ask questions of the authors. Below each post we've placed the date of the post and the name of the person who wrote it. To find and read the complete post, go to the blog home page (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs) and use the navigation calendar in the right hand column to browse to the date in question.
Weekly planning on the go
Most of us have learned over the years that weekly planning is a key to successful time management. But finding the time to do it is another thing, especially when you travel a lot. I've found that I can use my Pocket PC when traveling to help me plan for the next week. I usually do this on a Friday on the flight back home. If I don't finish the planning session, I schedule an appointment with myself to finish it the following Monday morning.
Checklists are very helpful with planning sessions and evaluating them later on. This is especially true when you're on the road and have a thousand thoughts on your mind; a checklist helps bring focus to the task at hand. I use ListPro to create these (http://www.iliumsoft.com) (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: ListPro is a third-party application that makes it easy to create and organize lists on your Windows Mobile device.
While it's difficult to check the inboxes sitting on your desk while you're on the road, you can do pretty much everything else that's shown on my checklist. Your Pocket PC will have your appointments, and you can also carry Word documents or Excel spreadsheets describing the different roles you have in your job. These documents can also specify your goals for each role. Also, your projects and the "someday" and "maybe" items can easily be kept in your Tasks list. I go into a good bit of detail on this on the Managing Tasks portion of my Web site (http://www.dkeener.com/keenstuff/tasks.html).
Hopefully, this gives you some ideas on how you can do your own planning session and weekly reviews when you travel. However, when you can, I recommend doing the review in your office, where you have access to the files you need and where you have the peace and quiet to open up your mind to consider possibilities for the following week.
Posted on 2/19/07 by Bruce Keener
Printer-friendly version
