Things have been getting hectic in the office and despite my ever present Filofax I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to keep track of all the "goings on." I'm thrilled that my business is healthy and the list of happy clients is growing and so to keep the business vibrant, I've been thinking lately about getting a personal assistant. And not just for my business...but for my life.
This morning I read with delight about The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (found via 43 Folders). Honestly, you have to read the excerpt from "Outsourcing Life"... I couldn't stop myself from smiling and exclaiming "Hey I want that too!" I was tempted to immediately put Tim's new book into my shopping cart at Amazon, but then thought better of it...why not just go out to the bookstore and buy that book RIGHT NOW? Yeah...well once the phones started ringing, and the deadlines started popping and the emails started coming in...I completely forget about the book until now. (Thus a perfect example of the need for a personal assistant...I can't even get to the bookstore to buy the book to help me help myself, for heaven's sakes!)
A few weeks ago I bought my first Blackberry. It took the sales dude an hour to talk me into the purchase. Now that I have this sweet little phone (yeah yeah...it's not a IPhone but I'll never switch over to AT&T) I can't imagine how on earth I got along without it. Of course now, the purchase of a shiny new gadget requires...hoho...time to learn about the new device and the software to sync the device to my MAC. Fine. I did a bit of research and because all my stuff is on my MAC I needed something that would sync the phone to the MAC OS without duplicating contacts or messing up my carefully culled calendar entries. After reading some reviews on PocketMac (see...another thing my personal assistant could have helped with) I settled on downloading Missing Sync. It worked very well, didn't mess up any of my contacts or calendars and I'm pretty much pleased with it. But gosh, if I could only do more with the emails and calendar to organize them and link them to the associated projects that would be great. I have many projects and often each project has quite a time line of tasks that need to be completed and several people to be contacted along the way. The trick is getting each application to sync with the other and then sync to my Blackberry.
Somewhere I read about Market Circle's Daylite and once again via Missing Sync I was reminded of that program. I absolutely hate Microsoft's Entourage and the calendar on my MAC hard drive doesn't do all I want it too. I don't want to access all my info from a web server so BaseCamp is not a option for me. Could Daylite be the personal assistant I am searching for? Or even better...could Daylite be of assistance to my personal assistant? Today I downloaded Daylite Productivity Suite. I've so far synchronized my calendar and contact list with the program and am now going thru. the stages of learning *sigh* the new program. I'm still convinced that an actual 3 dimensional personal assistant is someone I'd like to get to know better but until then my hope is that by putting everything in order I might make better use of my time. As I discover Daylite I'll keep you posted on the pros and cons. I'm also looking to a billing and invoicing program to make nice with my filing system (which presently consists of a box). How do you manage your daily activities?
I'm actually a big fan of paper - paper calendars, paper notebooks, etc. Probably a strange sentiment from an electrical engineer & high-flying, high-tech dude, but in terms of security, reliability, accessibility, readability and flexibility, I just haven't found anything that can beat my little pocket notebooks & calendars.
Posted by: Dan Ward | June 28, 2007 at 08:38 AM