First, Kill Outlook. Call it a mission of mine. I've been excited about the prospect of taking my email online ever since I started blogging online 5 years ago. And this year, finally, I felt as if the interweb was ready for me to accomplish the first task I have for becoming truly 100% technology agnostic.
It all began in January when I had been planning on doing less from my desktop. Between work and home and travel and having a business and lifestyle that thrives online, I've been asking myself why I'm still using outlook. There's just so much your email, tasks, calendar and notes could do if they played nice with other systems. I have been envious of my friends who use iCal feeds in their Calendars on google and on their macs, for starters. But I've also wanted to share my free-busy schedule with friends and family. I've also wanted to keep my projects (managed in basecamp) in my calendar but I couldn't do that on outlook. But more than that, I've just wanted a way to be as flexible as possible in the event that I bought a new computer or had a major drive crash or just wanted to share a file with a friend without having to email it. So this year has been a serious pursuit in living out my modest mission of relying on my desktop less for utility and storage and instead using the computer as a lightweight portal to the life I live online.
What follows is an ongoing saga. The characters? plaxo, yahoo mail, yahoo calendar, verizon wireless (Wireless Sync), Treo 700w, socialtext, gmail, google docs, blinksale, firefox, IE, safari, linkedin, basecamp, mac os x, vista, parallels, assembla, mag.nolia, last.fm, iTunes, mp3tunes, streamload, box.net, omnidrive, dandelife (of course!), amazon, netflix, TiVo, my.yahoo.com, twitter, southwest.com, eBay.
Little did I know that by cutting one desktop application from my life that I'd be adding so much more complexity to my life. Has killing outlook actually made my life more productive? That has yet to be determined....
It all began in January when I had been planning on doing less from my desktop. Between work and home and travel and having a business and lifestyle that thrives online, I've been asking myself why I'm still using outlook. There's just so much your email, tasks, calendar and notes could do if they played nice with other systems. I have been envious of my friends who use iCal feeds in their Calendars on google and on their macs, for starters. But I've also wanted to share my free-busy schedule with friends and family. I've also wanted to keep my projects (managed in basecamp) in my calendar but I couldn't do that on outlook. But more than that, I've just wanted a way to be as flexible as possible in the event that I bought a new computer or had a major drive crash or just wanted to share a file with a friend without having to email it. So this year has been a serious pursuit in living out my modest mission of relying on my desktop less for utility and storage and instead using the computer as a lightweight portal to the life I live online.
What follows is an ongoing saga. The characters? plaxo, yahoo mail, yahoo calendar, verizon wireless (Wireless Sync), Treo 700w, socialtext, gmail, google docs, blinksale, firefox, IE, safari, linkedin, basecamp, mac os x, vista, parallels, assembla, mag.nolia, last.fm, iTunes, mp3tunes, streamload, box.net, omnidrive, dandelife (of course!), amazon, netflix, TiVo, my.yahoo.com, twitter, southwest.com, eBay.
Little did I know that by cutting one desktop application from my life that I'd be adding so much more complexity to my life. Has killing outlook actually made my life more productive? That has yet to be determined....
Comments:
SanjayKumar (March 27, 2007. 02:37pm)
Online is fantastic, but don't you wish that stuff was all integrated to all hell? You, like me, want "consolidated flexibility". Does such a beast exist?
http://www.simplifythis.com
kga245 (March 27, 2007. 04:16pm)
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm afraid of. I fear that by opening myself up to going online for all of these services I've made my life more complicated. I'm seriously considering just going back to the way things were. Now that I'm on a mac, I guess that means using Mac Mail, iCalendar, etc. I had such high hopes!