Organize with LoafingCactus

Palm Pilot - great stuff, hardware

Shadow Plan MUST HAVE!!!

This is the program that makes the Palm Pilot. It is basically a hierarchical list maker with sorting and filtering features that links to your Calendar and ToDo list. So you can, for example, create a list for a project and link the tasks to your ToDo list. The items show up on your ToDo list on the day that the come up, but you can look at the whole list and organize it in Shadow Plan.

Action Names

Action names is the Calendar, To Do and Contacts program that I use. There are several of them, but this one has icons- an important feature! It also links you Contacts to you ToDos and your Calendar items. You can click on the item to go to the Contact or look at the Contact to see all the items associated with it. There are several other programs that have a loyal following- I haven't looked into all of them.

BugMe

Stickies for your Palm. Now that you can write on the Memo pad this isn't necessary for quick phone notes. It is good for daily reminders (take your pills, take a break at work, etc.). If you know other people with Palms you can send them BugMe notes with characters like Garfield.

Documents to Go

Create and Edit Word and Excel documents on your Palm. View HTML and PowerPoint on your Palm. Read your email (and send from your Palm if you have a modem.)

Avantgo.com

Updates selected periodicals to your Palm. Free.

Vivonic

Tracks your exercise and eating and gives you bar graphs based on your goals for total calories and some categories like protein, carbs and fat.

WorldMate

Shows you clocks from your current time zone and five other time zones. Clickable world map. Country codes and area codes. Clothing size charts. Currency exchange rate calculator that can be updated from WorldMate's web site.

ChessMaster

Great Chess program. Play against the computer or against a friend.

Battleship

Freeware that plays between two Palm Pilots.

Handango.com

The best place to buy (or download free) Palm Pilot programs. At a lot of Palm program sites you have to wade through a lot of junk to find the programs you want. This site has filtered out most of the junk.

Hardware

A Palm Pilot is a box for your stuff. As long as you sync regularly, if you lose your Palm you can quickly replace it with a new one. These days, you can get a good Palm for a couple hundred dollars. If you are going to be a heavy user, you need either 16 MB or memory sticks. A high resolution color screen is worth it.

Buy lots of styli . Put some at home, at work, in your car, in your briefcase or purse. You will loose them, I promise.

Planner Pages

I created these planner pages (loads in Excel) because the pages I've been able to find didn't have a few features I wanted. Features:

	These pages have 4AM to 9PM & later time slots for all seven days of the week. Most planners only have 7AM to 9PM at the most, for Monday through Friday only.
	These pages have Saturday and Sunday on a separate page. This is what gives room to show all the time slots for these days, and also offers some privacy concerning your personal time when you have your planner open at work.

This page last updated 27 September 2003.

thecactus@loafingcactus.com